Although there are several ways that they can be delivered, the most typical model is where students watch instructional material online by themselves, then do their homework in class. It seems to me that this would be an ideal situation for an introvert.
Perhaps. But it depends on what you mean by "do their homework in class." If this just means students working individually on assignments while a teacher walks around and helps them, then yes, it's probably a good model for introverts.
In practice, though, most "flipped" teaching involves more than just individual students working on their own in a classroom. Most instructors try to make use of various in-class activities and assessments that differ from a traditional "work alone on your own" homework assignment. This often involves interacting with neighboring students at a minimum ("check your neighbor!" or "discuss your opinion of the answer with them for 1 minute" or whatever), and likely various forms of "group work" or collaborations.
Many if not most instructors who adopt a "flipped" classroom are likely producing situations that result in much MORE social interaction during learning. So, in practice, I don't think flipped learning is going to get rave reviews from most introverts.
"Collaborative learning," "project-based learning," any kind of focus on groups or group projects, and so on are often a teaching buzzwords for "Put all the kids in a group so the smart kids can carry the dumb kids and then on paper it looks like everyone is doing well."
That's probably the most cynical way of putting it. A well-organized group project with proper evaluation and assessment can do more than that. Part of the problem is finding suitable types of projects for group work. Projects that are open-ended, exploratory, require experimentation (and often benefit from people with different ideas for approaches) -- group work can be good there.
With younger children -- who haven't yet become so utterly cynical about education and haven't bought into the American malaise of anti-intellectualism -- groups of different ability levels can be incredibly beneficial. It's a common approach in many Montessori and private school classrooms, where grade levels are often combined to everyone's benefit. The younger or slower kids watch the older and smarter kids, and they often have an innate capacity to help each other learn together.
Here is the way a "group project" worked at my old school:
I empathize with your description; I recall many similar situations in school myself. Part of the problem is the cultural divide I mentioned above -- many older kids and teenagers simply don't value excellence in education.
But another major flaw in your description is the lack of an appropriate assessment. "Dumb and mediocre kids" shouldn't get an "A" just because the overall work of a group gets an "A." Learning should be tested via a separate assessment -- whether an individual report or a test on the material learned through the group project or whatever.
Group work shouldn't be a vehicle to give everyone an "A." It's a different learning strategy, which can sometimes be helpful with proper guidance from a teacher. The results of the group should not be substituted for an individual assessment strategy, and if you had teachers who did that, you're probably correct that it wasn't the best method of education.
Aaah excellent more maker hate from randos on the internet. I don't get the sheer level of vitriol aimed at people who instead of sitting on their arses watching TV or whining on the internet actually get up and do something with their time. Jealousy, perhaps?
GP does come across as unnecessarily insulting. That's not a justification for ad hominem in return, though.
A few things:
(1) There *IS* a significant difference between the modern "maker" and the traditional "craftsman." In general, the sense I get of the maker movement is that it does not focus on specialization -- rather on general familiarity with a wide variety of tools, equipment, and approaches. This is quite different from a traditional craftsman, who might spend years apprenticing to learn a specific subset of skills, then decades perfecting those skills. One cannot compare a "maker" who learned how to use a power saw last week to help with his random electronics project that has a wood frame with a carpenter who has been doing complex woodworking for 25 years. I think that's kinda the point GP was making, even if it was expressed poorly. And it's a legitimate point.
(2) Of the few self-identified "makers" I've conversed with for any period of time, most of them have in fact come across as pretentious dilettantes who don't really know much of anything about traditional crafts. Yet they act like all of their knowledge is so powerful and deep. I'm not claiming my sample is representative, but it is what I've observed.
(3) I have absolutely nothing against most of the "maker" goals. Being familiar with "how stuff works" and "how to do things" used to be, well, common knowledge. Reviving these skills and encouraging inventiveness and creativity with physical objects is in general a very good thing.
(4) That said, because of my experiences with the pretentious idiots above, I would never want anyone to refer to me as a "maker," despite the fact that I value many of the same skills and have for decades. I also don't consider that most of my skills qualify me for any special title -- they're just general purpose things that any person should be familiar with, like basic woodworking, mechanical know-how, electronics, etc. Just because I've built some of my own things out of wood and tend to take apart an electric device to try to fix it (rather than throwing it out right away and buying a new one) doesn't grant me any special status -- it's just living life and being a well-rounded person with some practical skills.
What I find particularly unattractive about the "maker" designation is how they've tried to co-opt every person who does just about anything and try to act like they are part of this "movement." Recently, when I told someone that I bake bread rather than buy it from the store, ferment stuff, experiment with making soft cheeses, occasionally can things, and do a few other things in the kitchen, they asked whether I was a "maker."
What the heck? No -- I'm doing exactly what my grandmother did. It's practical, useful skills in my kitchen that save me money and frankly produce food that tastes better than anything I can buy in grocery store.
Have you ever sewn something? Have you ever made your own soap? Do you compost in your backyard? Apparently, you too can be a maker.
For some people, it's gotten to the point that having any basic practical skill which most people send out to a 3rd party turns you into a "maker."
And most of the time, the emphasis that I've heard from the self-identified "makers" I know is on simplicity and deliberate avoidance of advanced skills. The typical "maker" isn't striving to create a beautiful ornate cabinet with inlaid wood of four different colors -- no... the "maker" wants to be able have a "recipe" that chops up a pre-fabricated door into seven parts and reassembles it as an ugly, but functional cabinet in an afterno
I guess it would be better for the terminal. "I see you're trying to invoke sudo, would you like the man pages for that?"
If Clippy was available for the terminal in Linux, I'm sure it would just be full of random Easter eggs, coupled with its general pattern of random annoyance. I can just see it now...
[After a few minutes of inactivity...]
It looks like you're trying to take a break. Can I help?
~/ $ Clippy, leave me alone
Malfunction. Need input.
~/ $ Fine. Clippy -- make me a sandwich
I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that.
~/ $ sudo make me a sandwich
Okay.
Would you like some coffee with that?
~/ $ Now you're talking, Clippy. Yeah, get me some coffee with extra milk.
No milk. This Clippy does not have Super Cow Powers.
That sound you heard was the OP's point whooshing over your head. Nobody is debating that it's an astronomical event - only that it's a non-event, of no actual significance beyond generating media hype.
It depends on what you mean by "actual significance." Sure, nothing is colliding tonight. No major astronomical bodies are being destroyed with the force of millions of nuclear explosions or anything.
But astronomy is primarily an observational science. People who are interested in astronomy generally get all excited about "rare events," which generally happen at least once per month -- "ooh, there's a conjunction of X and Y!" or "this is the closest approach of X and Y for the next 18 years!"
That IS what most amateur astronomers consider "actual significance." It's sort of like birdwatching -- where it's fun to spot something "rare" or whatever. (I'm personally not that into it, though I have found it mildly interesting in the past.)
Anyhow, a total lunar eclipse -- while not that uncommon -- is already the most interesting astronomical event that laypeople can easily observe. I myself have been surprised by them a number of times -- I'm just driving along at night and happen to turn in the direction of the full moon, and there it is with the tell-tale orange-ish or red-ish hue, or with an apparent chunk out of it.
This one happens to occur when the moon is somewhat bigger and brighter, so yeah, it's probably one of the most interesting and visible astronomical events that most people would ever bother to look at. Most other things that get even amateur astronomy buffs interested would require a telescope or at least binoculars and some knowledge of the sky. But any 5-year-old can point up tonight and say, "Hey Mom -- Look! The moon is red!! Cool!"
Is that of "actual significance"? Depends on your definition. But it's at least mildly cool. And if it gets some kids interested in science, what the heck is your problem with it? It's not "media hype" to point out one of the most visible astronomical phenomena.
What, exactly, is useful about memorizing facts, in a world where any fact you want is at your fingertips on demand? Being usefully conversant in facts is not about memorization, it's about understanding relationships between things. Understanding how stuff works.
I agree with you that the "understanding relationships" etc. is more important in being an educated person than memorized rote knowledge.
The problem, however, is that one actually needs something in your brain to "understand relationships" between. You can't "understand how stuff works" if you don't even know there is "stuff" to begin with.
I'm absolutely NOT arguing for lots of rote memorization. But I think a common error (and an increasingly serious problem) today is the idea that memorization is worthless because... well, "Google can answer it." Yeah, that's great if you're looking up some atomic fact. But what if finding an answer to a problem depends on connecting seemingly unrelated atomic facts? If they are both in your brain, you may be able to figure it out. But if not, you're out of luck (unless someone has solved that exact problem before and posted it on the internet).
Traditional specialization in a career, for example, usually required adaptability. If you were a mechanic or a machinist or whatever, having 25 years of experience wasn't just about making fewer mistakes -- it was about having a brain full of knowledge that could make such connections when needed. That often included a lot of obscure facts derived from experience... "Oh, don't even bother trying that part on that model, because it uses X and although they say it's different from Y, both the mechanisms on based on principle Z."
Memorization can SOMETIMES be a way to fast-track understanding and make those subsequent connections easier to make. Memorization for the sake of memorization is stupid, but if you're memorizing information that you can actually use on a regular basis, it might actually be helpful in doing stuff like you say: "understanding relationships between things" requires knowing something about "things."
The facts you need will be memorized along the way.
That does tend to happen when you use information frequently. But sometimes it can actually be helpful to force oneself to KNOW stuff in advance. (I can't believe I actually need to argue for this....) And sometimes you don't know what you might need to know, and knowing SOMETHING that is potentially relevant can give you an advantage over someone else who just has to blindly Google things rather than actually knowing anything.
In medieval times, when books were expensive and scarce, there used to be an entire "art of memory," a method which facilitated memorization of long passages of writings and even entire books. There were drawings showing people "eating books" too -- this was the symbolism given to the act of memorization, because once one had these complete texts in one's brain, it allows a much more thorough "digestion" of the ideas and contents of these texts.
I'm not saying that we should go back to that. But there's something different about knowledge that is actually in your brain, and memorization can sometimes be a useful TOOL to get it there.
Science isn't supposed to be fun. It's a method and its rigorous.
Scientific education can very well be fun. The best way to convince people ignorant of science that the scientific method is useful is by doing exploratory exercises with them (often "fun") and then gradually introducing rigor to show them how scientific methods work better.
I speak as someone who has taught high-school science. One of the first activities I would do with physics students was to give them a few different types of pendula and a stopwatch. I would divide them into groups and tell them to come up with a way of predicting what the period should be.
That's about all the instructions I gave.
They'd get a few days of this -- I'd bring the class together at the end of each period, and we'd talk about what they had discovered. Hmm -- the mass of the weight at the end of the string didn't seem to matter. The initial angle didn't seem to make much of a difference either. Etc.
I'd walk around the room in each class and gradually give suggestions and hints on better ways to collect and organize data, answer questions, provide additional equipment upon request, etc.
By the end of a week, most of them had learned more about the scientific method than many physics students do in a year (if they only performed calculations and solved equations). And most of them found it interesting -- it was a puzzle to solve, a physical thing that they were expected to figure out how it worked. Once one group figured out that graphing their data might help, all of sudden someone would realize it was a parabola... and pretty soon they could come up with an equation.
Exploratory science is essential for education -- that's how little kids learn. But many of them have is stomped out of them by middle school, forced to sit in desks and learn things by rote or by doing dozens of repetitive exercises. There is certainly a place for memorization and repetition, but there's no reason why science can't also include fun exploratory activities.
You can talk about the definition of a "theory" or "hypothesis" or whatever until you're blue in the face, but nothing beats making kids actually have to DO IT.
Science is treated like a religion, and the philosophy of science and especially its skepticism is missing in the discussion, covered instead by "omg isn't this science looking thing cool".
And this is precisely the problem with science education that isn't fun and exploratory in nature. If kids spend years sitting in science classrooms being dictated to and told the "facts" of science, when and how exactly are they supposed to acquire the skills to form and evaluate their own hypotheses with appropriate skepticism? If they never try to do it, how would you expect people to be able to do it regarding other science they encounter in the world in their lives?
Of course those sorts of skills are hard to test on things like standardized tests, so teachers in many public schools feel like they don't have time to actually train kids in the actual process of DOING science, rather than memorizing facts ABOUT it.
Pseudoscience abounds. Looks at nutrition science. You can't even tell anymore what is actual science and what is total nonsense based on anecdote... because the methods are almost the same.
I'm not sure precisely what you're referencing. Nutrition science, properly speaking, is NOT based on "anecdote" more than anything else -- it requires data collection, control groups, data analysis, etc.
But the big problem with much of science -- and not just nutrition, but medicine in general, and psychology, and most "social science" (increasingly even harder sciences) -- is the substitution of (badly done) statistical procedures for any semblance of experimental judgment. We now live in a world where we act as though simple statistics can "do science" for us -- and we have all the thin
sorry man, accounting ledgers are double entry, spreadsheets are not. they are planning tools, not accounting tools at heart
What the heck are you talking about? Your post shows a great ignorance of classical accounting, as well as spreadsheets (which, by the way, historically ARE derived from accounting books, despite what you may think).
Anyhow, a few other points to note:
-- Old-school paper double-entry accounting often uses plenty of single-entry books as well, often known as journals or daybooks (though informally they are often called "ledgers" too). They are essential bookkeeping records as well.
-- It's a trivial exercise to set up a computer spreadsheet to do double-entry accounting, either using multiple sheets or the same sheet. If you can't figure out how to do that, you don't know how to use a spreadsheet -- like someone who thinks a teacher needs a dedicated "grading software" program to calculate averages or curves or "drop the lowest grade."
-- Early computerized spreadsheets were designed to imitate traditional accounting ledgers and other books organized in tabular format. They were deliberately made in a very general format that could be modified to imitate any of a number of tradition record-keeping books.
-- You are at least somewhat correct that early on people realized their usefulness for planning and projection purposes as well -- but those sorts of tasks (budgeting, etc.) were traditionally done in tabular form as well... it's just that paper books didn't have the flexibility to instantly recompute.
--Any business who actually needs the complexity of double-entry accounting today generally uses dedicated accounting software. That's true. But it's not because one couldn't set up a spreadsheet to do most tasks. It certainly would be an easier task than setting up and manually recording numbers in physical record books a couple generations ago. But dedicated accounting software comes with pre-packaged solutions and databases with better record-handling than simple spreadsheets.
-- Lastly, if you doubt that spreadsheets could be used for double-entry accounting, you can do a quick internet search and find a number of solutions designed to load directly in Excel that do precisely that.
You can rest easy, though. So many illiterate people have taken up "bold-faced" in lieu of "bald-faced"/"bare-faced" that it is rapidly becoming perfectly accepted.
This is a very specific linguistic phenomenon, known to usage experts these days as an eggcorn (itself a reference to people using the term eggcorn rather than acorn). There's an entry for bold-faced lie in the Eggcorn Database.
Eggcorns are interesting from a linguistic perspective, because they often involve three mechanisms which reinforce the change: (1) the new word or phrase sounds very similar to the old one, (2) the new word or phrase incorporates new elements that have a certain logical relationship to some meanings of the old word/phrase, and (3) the new components often substitute for archaic words or usage that often only have stuck around in obscure English idioms. (In this case, "bald" and "bold" sound similar, these types of lies often involve a sort of "boldness," and nobody uses the term "bald-faced" anymore outside of that idiom.)
Thus in tiny pieces a language is corrupted.
Meh. "Corruption" in language is a matter of perspective. Language naturally evolves. These types of "corruptions" have often been around for decades or even centuries. If they happen to date back more than a century or two, they're usually accepted as "legitimate English," even if their origin is as screwed up as your example (and often more so). If Shakespeare said it, by definition it's okay.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to hold to "standards," particularly in formal writing. But at some point these things become a lost cause. (See, for example, the word "decimate," which comes from a Latin practice of reduction by 1/10th, i.e., reducing to 90% of the original strength or size. NOBODY uses the word to mean this anymore -- instead implying a much greater reduction in size, if not complete destruction -- and if you try to imply the original meaning outside of describing Roman army practices, no one would understand your meaning. Outside of specific historical usage, "decimate" simply means something else now.)
And sometimes the people who complain about linguistic "decay" and "corruption" are the worst offenders -- in their zeal to "fix" English and stamp out usages that sound wrong to them, they often end up creating their own stupid errors.
It's one of the reasons English spelling is so screwed up. See here for a few quick examples of common English words where pretentious idiots tried to make English conform to a mistaken "rule" and added silent letters to words for no apparent reason.
TL;DR -- You're right, and careful writers should take heed. But easy on the "corruption" rant, lest you become a greater danger to English than those you criticize.
And THIS is the problem with spreadsheets, people are using them for columnar text formatting, for lists and the like, and NOT calculations.
Uh, spreadsheets aren't just for calculations, and they never have been. They're for any kind of data storage or manipulation which could benefit from organization into columns and rows. That includes things like lists of records with text fields (like names) that might benefit from data manipulation (like sorting alphabetically or whatever).
In case you don't realize this, spreadsheets derive from accounting ledgers, which similarly held RECORDS. Calculations was one thing they could be used for, such as keeping a running tab on an account balance or whatever. But they also often were a place to consolidate various information, such as invoice lists of names, addresses, other customer data, etc.
Keeping a list of attendees for a party seems like a fine usage for a spreadsheet. Sure, a dedicated calendar app might have more specific functionality, but only if you want those functions. If all is needed is a place to store data in an organized fashion, why NOT a spreadsheet?
(And before you start complaining about how modern Excel is a bloated piece of crap, I'll happily agree with you -- but the ability to format text and column cells is important even if you want to do the most basic reporting with data involving calculations. So, you can hardly dispense with most of that and still end up with an application that anyone would want to use. People adopted spreadsheets because they could store data conveniently in a useful format -- if all they wanted was calculations, they could have just used a calculator or adding machine.)
Evertime there is a Hurricane Evacuation you get a couple dozen that die from car accidents or falling off ladders boarding up their houses to prevent looting, etc. That is one of the reasons politicians are wary of calling evacuations unless really needed.
And yet politicians also seem lined up to cheer for security "theatre" at airports, when it can result in similar indirect deaths and injuries.
What am I talking about? Despite the common fear of flying and airplane accidents, car accidents are MUCH, MUCH more common to result in death or serious injury. Some studies have indicated that people choosing to travel by car rather than plane in the months after 9/11 may have resulted in the deaths of over a thousand more people.
I know a number of people who fly less frequently now partly because of how annoying it is to deal with unnecessary airport security. I have made that choice myself a few times, particularly for shorter road trips (say, less than 5-6 hours) where I'd be tempted to take a shuttle and fly before. Now it's just not worth the extra hassle and time -- I usually allow a lot more time than I used to pre-9/11 when showing up to the airport, in case the security lines are long or some idiot shuts them down with a water bottle or doesn't take his shoes off. And I have to be much more careful about what I pack or carry on with me -- in my car, I can bring whatever I want.
Anyhow, there are many estimates that road traffic increased by a few percent (particularly around holidays) due to people avoiding airports and TSA hassles. Driving is significantly less safe than flying. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the TSA has indirectly caused the deaths of hundreds or even thousands of people due to these kinds of decisions.
Anyhow -- going back to hurricanes, there are plenty of other reasons why politicians may be hesitant to call for evacuation. It does lead to panic. But it also generally increases spending on emergency services (something that requires more tax dollars, something politicians don't want to have to raise), while simultaneously moving people out of their jurisdictions, where they don't patronize local businesses for days (and, as you point out, looting can make things even worse), even with a "false alarm." People lose income as well if they evacuate for something that turns out to be a "false alarm," which also can be a hit for the local economy. Thus, the local economy takes a hit, the government budget takes a hit in providing extra services... all economic problems that politicians want to avoid unless absolutely necessary. I'm not saying they don't take unintended deaths into account, but that's probably not their primary concern.
Not really, high school and middle school are made up of different age ranges. Those ranges have more to do with protecting the younger from the older and reflect the physiological differences in the ages because of puberty.
Um, how many students graduate high school outside of the specified state-mandated kindergarten start date of their age cohort? Maybe a few percent at most? There may be some mixture of ages in higher grades, but mostly students are stuck in a group of students who are within one year of their age... regardless of intellectual level. Yes -- it's possible in most schools to move out of that system for particular students, but it is considered abnormal (and thus introduces excessive social problems often because it is considered so abnormal).
It isn't segregation it is grouping to help students and educators. Those groupings can be ignored for special cases.
Note that these are precisely the same claims that were made when white and black schools were deliberately segregated. Segregation is almost always justified as being helpful to the those who are forced to be segregated -- blacks were considered inferior, and thus obviously it would be easier on them and on their teachers to separate them out.
Our rather rigid age segregation in most public schools results in a lot of harm, in my opinion. Look at studies, for example, on students who are born in spring vs. fall. Just because students start kindergarten at roughly 5.5 years instead of roughly 5 years often makes a large developmental difference in outcomes, even as late as high school. Then look at the outliers and see how they are affected. Age segregation may be the "best" system of segregation for educational purposes, but I think the evidence is far from as conclusive as you act.
Segregating by sex is a different beast. What you are saying is that girls are too weak to be in the same class room as boys to enjoy CS. I call bullshit.
I said NO SUCH THING. Please re-read my comment. I quote:
The question is whether the differences in behavior, interest, and educational quality coming from segregation by sex in this particular education context are enough to justify the separation. I don't know whether they are or not...
I also in no way said that "girls were too weak to be in the same class room" -- I said that adolescent behavioral studies have shown that girls act DIFFERENTLY when in girls-only situations, and that SOME studies have concluded that there are some features which MAY have educational advantages.
I would also note that some of these same studies have claimed that boys-only classes do WORSE than mixed classrooms. (Others have claimed no significant effect, or a mild trend to toward the opposite.)
Pretending that adolescent boys and adolescent girls are exactly the same is ridiculous. And refusing to acknowledge that there are odd social interactions that happen between sexes during adolescence is even more ridiculous.
I'm NOT arguing in favor of segregating by sex. I'm saying that we know classroom dynamics are altered in mixed classrooms vs. all-girls or all-boys classrooms. Just like classroom dynamics would be altered if you threw 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders together, compared to segregating by age. There are positives and negatives to lots of these things, and maybe we should think about them, because there are major physical and psychological differences between sexes, particularly during puberty.
And lastly, by the way, lest you think I'm somehow prejudiced against girls here, it's precisely the opposite -- the argument that the studies I mentioned make is basically that girls often mature a little faster and could benefit from being separated from a bunch of disruptive male idiots who are still too immature to allow a place for the wisdom of their female counterparts in their (segregated) age cohort.
If you don't "get" the power of compounding, PLEASE look it up. It's one of the most powerful forces which affects your financial security.
Uh, what are you talking about? My calculations included compounding, as could be easily verified it you tried yourself.
If it were simple interest, the 1% every 3 days would only earn approximately 121% per year. As I said in my calculations, it's well over 200% per year. Why? Compounding.
You wanna be a jerk? Fine -- but be sure you have a freakin' clue of what you're talking about first.
Wait, 1.01^121 (every third day) is 3.3 So we are talking about THREE HUNDERT percent a year. Never mind.
It's unclear where TFS got its numbers. TFA says:
claiming he would pay investors one percent interest on their investment every three days, or seven percent a week.
I'm guessing that the article is implying these are two different options? Because obviously 1% every 3 days != 7% per week.
The first option (assuming a year length of 365.25 days) gives the result of about $336 with an initial $100 investment, making a net profit (annual return) of about 236%.
The second option gives about $3414 with a $100 investment, resulting in an annual return of 3314%, which is at least in the ballpark of the number of 3641% listed in TFS.
If he were offering these two separate options, it seems insane to take the first one. And if TFS somehow screwed up the math and is trying to describe the same thing... well, I have no clue what the actual return was supposed to be.
Segregation is the answer. Sometimes groups need a space where they can be away from the things that are giving them problems, with the goal of later re-integration.
You heard it here first. Up next, white only bathrooms, and asian only programing camps.
We already segregate in education.
We segregate by age, often sorting kids into arbitrary "boxes" depending on their birthdays. It's usually quite difficult and disruptive to break out of age segregation in the public school system.
We segregate by ability level, placing students in "honors" classes or better "sections" of students, which has both benefits (teachers can tailor lessons more) and drawbacks (once a kid gets sorted in the "lower" section, it can be difficult for him/her ever to catch up to the higher section, even if very motivated and a "late bloomer" in terms of interest/ability).
These types of segregation are based on particular beliefs about age-based schemes of development and supposed goals of tracking based on previous student performance. They're well-accepted as legitimate, but obviously they fail to provide the best benefit in many cases of particular students.
The question about segregation is whether or not the overall differences justify the separation. Generally, the differences in black and white humans, for example, would NOT justify separate bathrooms (obviously).
We know that boys and girls develop physically, psychologically, socially, and intellectually on somewhat different timescales as adolescents. We know that adolescence is often a time of heightened sexual tension and awkwardness, which can result in significant differences in behaviors between segregated sex groups vs. mixed ones. We have studies that have shown both benefits and drawbacks of segregating sexes in education -- for one example, adolescent girls often are more deferential or less likely to assert their own opinions in a mixed group compared to an all-girls group. This can impact whether girls speak up to ask questions or to offer their opinion in class exercises, etc.
So, the question is not whether we should allow segregation -- we already allow segregation according to some schemes based on broad criteria (like age). If we got rid of age segregation and went back to a "one-room schoolhouse" model, it would inevitably be beneficial to some students, fo example. (Many private schools and Montessori-based schools take this approach, having classrooms that span 2-4 "grade levels," which often benefits both the young kids, who learn by watching older kids, and the older kids, who reinforce their knowledge through teaching and explanation.)
The question is whether the differences in behavior, interest, and educational quality coming from segregation by sex in this particular education context are enough to justify the separation. I don't know whether they are or not, but acting like "all segregation is bad" or refusing to acknowledge that we already do it is needlessly inflammatory and unproductive.
Something tells me Ed Regis isn't about to climb Everest either.
And why should he, exactly?
I'm not being a troll here, nor am I trying to dissuade anyone from their mountain-climbing hobbies. I've enjoyed climbing on small scales myself, though mostly I prefer hiking (even on more difficult terrain).
Anyhow, I can see some idea of "human achievement" in having the first person summit Everest. On the other hand, this was achieved in the days before we had robots or planes or whatever to do the exploring for us.
But nowadays, you're talking about investing a huge amount of time and energy and money (probably $50k or more), not to mention the resources required to get there, the litter most hikers leave on the mountain (including garbage, human waste, etc. which especially befouls the most popular -- and now frequently crowded -- routes), etc.
And even if you make it to base camp, you have only about a 50% chance of getting to the top. And now you have a lot of random idiots with minimal climbing experience who want to do it too.
What does it prove? You're a badass?
I'm all for people having goals. But I for one would be happy if fewer idiots were leaving their garbage trails on Everest just to have some sort of "notch in their belt." A hundred years from now, we'll probably look at many of these climbers today as many people look at the dentist who killed a lion recently... yeah, it was awesome to go on "big game" hunts and collect trophies in Africa 100 years ago, but is that really a practice that we should put so much cultural value on anymore?
Going to Mars is a similar exercise in human folly unless or until we can find a way to make it legitimately sustainable and useful, rather than just some sort of random "goal" to do "just because it's there." Decades ago when Azimov and other writers were imagining bases on Mars, there was also a legitimate point to such exploration -- we needed humans to explore because the idea of robots or machines being sophisticated enough to do it for us was also far-fetched.
But imagine how much MORE we could learn about Mars if we invested the amounts of money necessary to transport a human mission there into really developing better robotics with the equipment and sustainability to do serious testing there. And after a more thorough analysis of some possibilities and further exploration, we could make a determination about whether it would at all be feasible or useful to send humans there.
Of course, that would be logical and probably the most efficient use of funds, research, and effort -- but humans are not known for being logical or efficient. And lots of funds will only materialize with the notion of human exploration... even if it's another quest for some crazy humans to put a "notch on their belt."
Well, it has a little bit more than space, it has gravity, which seems to be important for various life process (of both man and plants).
Yes, but there's a well-known solution of a rotating space station to produce artificial gravity, an idea that has been around for more than a century.
The main problem is just funding the thing. But the amount of funds, resources, and amount of stuff needed to be launched into space to create a rotating space station is about as feasible as establishing a semi-permanent settlement on Mars. But travel to and from a rotating space station would be a LOT easier.
i dont see what these people are upset about. i mean, this is just a vision of your future if trump were to be President.;)
Agreed. How is this a surprise? I'm sure the Trump campaign just used the same formula for calculating donations that it uses to calculate Trump's net worth -- take the actual value and multiply it by some random number. After all, Trump's "brand" is apparently worth billions of dollars, but Trump's the only one who thinks so.
Hey Trump donors -- you just figured out how math works in Trump's world.
The explanation wasn't very clear, but I think this is how it works.
Student in 2015: "We charge you $34k tutition, but you are eligible for $20k grant, so you pay us $14k."
Same student in 2016: "We charge you $20k tuition, but you are eligible for $6k grant, so you pay us $14k"
Yes, that's the gist of it. But there's a lot of stuff that goes into that word "grant." College budgets are very complex, and there's a lot of reasons why those "grants" can be useful to move money around.
For one example, rich colleges with big endowments (over a billion dollars) generally pay at least 1/3 of that tuition "grant" money with endowment money.
Why would they do this? Sometimes because they have to. Endowment management often involves weird operations akin to money-laundering. Donors often give money that's earmarked for particular things, and for the college to actually make use of that money in their general budget, they need to find a way to funnel the money out of the endowment.
Tuition is an important factor for many richer colleges here. Let's say that you have a couple who has a decent amount of money that they want to give to the school. They're not rich enough to pay for a building or anything like that, but they'd like something smaller that they can put their name on.
So, they fund the "Jimmie and Maggie Stewart Scholarship in Basketweaving Studies," which can pay out $10,000 per year to some lucky undergraduate basketweaver (or perhaps a few of them, divvied up).
Jimmie and Maggie get a lot of "bang for their buck" here -- they get to feel good about funding undergraduate education, and often colleges will ask students who receive scholarships to write a letter of thanks or at least information to the donors periodically and/or host some "donor cocktail hours" or whatever where the donors get to mingle with the happy undergraduates and see where their money is going.
But now the college needs to get that money into its general funds to use it. So it has an incentive to "award the scholarship." On the other hand, the college can "double-dip" here by increasing tuition at the same time. Before the student paid $20k or whatever with no grant, but now the tuition can be $30k with a $10k scholarship, so the student gets a "scholarship" and is happy because they think they are getting a "deal" (and something to put on a resume), the donors are happy because they think they are helping students succeed in this era of high tuition, and the college actually increased its effective annual revenue by 50% for this student.
Most of the situations with endowments aren't that direct -- donors give money that's not earmarked for individual scholarships, but perhaps it's meant to go toward "undergraduate education" or whatever. (And many alumni often tend to feel the best about their undergrad experience, so they might donate toward that.)
Again, the school could try to use that money for direct expenses, like building a new gym or whatever, but then they have to justify it to endowment managers as directly relevant to "undergraduate education" -- is the new gym really necessary? Maybe... maybe not. But "tuition" really is considered "necessary" for undergraduate education, so if you give that money as a "grant" to a student to lower tuition, then the money flows directly from the endowment and back to the general college funds... where it can used to pay for the new climbing gym or another administrator's salary or whatever.
And that's just one type of "shell game" that goes on... but it's an important one for richer schools. Tuition hikes at smaller schools may have other pools of money or grants or whatever involved that having a "higher tuition" allows them to use more freely. Meanwhile, schools obviously have incentives to charge higher "official" tuition, since they can squeeze that money out of richer families and thus actually increase income.
Because the problem in both cases is not PAYING for these things, it is in the COST for these things. Changing who pays does not address the problem. As a matter of fact, as the government has picked up ever more of the cost of both healthcare and education, the cost has risen ever more rapidly.
Your statement is somewhat misleading. The problem with your assertion is that we currently have the worst possible situation, i.e., a partially-regulated solution where the government partially funds things. That's generally vastly worse from a regulatory and cost standpoint than full (or near-full) government funding.
Another problem is that in both of your situations the government has deliberately introduced "middle men" into the transactions that obscure costs and give motivations to inflate costs.
Example: public higher-ed in the mid 1900s often had a lot more direct state funding. Costs were kept low because state representatives demanded it (in representing taxpayers) and state governments had a big "stake" in providing affordable education.
But then you introduce huge federal student loan programs that provide a giant tap of free-flowing money to irrational parents and students who are willing to take their dollars anywhere to get ahead. Colleges (both public and private) now realize they can charge more tuition, and often they have to because state funding starts declining significantly. Many colleges ultimate start to take advantage of this situation to funnel money into their budgets by getting students and parents to take out bigger loans.
By distributing the costs among hoards of "middlemen" (parents and students) who all have different agendas and policies, colleges can grab ever more government money. That just wasn't true when the state was funding public colleges to a greater level through DIRECT taxpayer support -- in that case, the colleges would need to convince state representatives to raise taxes and pay more to the college, which was a much harder sell.
The problem isn't the government funding in terms of increasing costs -- it's the indirect nature of it all.
Something similar could be said for insurance, by the way. Compare the administrative costs for a "single-payer" system like Medicare to the costs for private insurance companies. Medicare costs a FRACTION of what private insurance companies skim off the top in "administrative fees" (i.e., profits), not to mention all the extra money that goes in paying for staff at hospitals and doctors' offices to argue with insurance companies and try to understand the multitude of difference types of policies just to get procedures approved for patients.
Once again, the problem with healthcare costs is the appearance of "middlemen," this time the insurance companies. Who has an incentive to lower costs here? Consumers don't generally pay much attention to their bills, because it's mostly a negotiation between a bunch of other parties -- the consumer just pays the premium and lets everyone else sort out the details, which means there's less consumer oversight. Meanwhile, both healthcare providers AND insurance companies have incentives to raise costs (particularly now with Obamacare, where "administrative" fees to insurers are capped by percentage, so insurers now actually have an incentive to drive up healthcare fees in order to increase profits).
I'm NOT saying the necessary solution is full government intervention or regulation, but the reason for the rapidly rising costs and market inefficiency is not due to government intervention per se, but by the introduction of unregulated or partially regulated middlemen (student loan customers and insurance companies).
Some research suggests it's only one parent - the mother - and her level of education that has an effect on future educational out comes.
If this "research" actually existed, you could have provided a link to it. Yet you didn't.
Don't be a jerk. In your previous post, you only provided a link to a random blog, which was reporting on a book that discussed a study, rather than an actual source. And the blog even disagreed with your conclusion!
Meanwhile, somebody replies and tries to add something, and you act like a complete jerk, with you scare quotes around "research" for no apparent reason.
Do a freakin' internet search, Bill. Top 20 hits on a search like "mother's education impact on child", I found at least 4 or 5 more reputable sources than your random blog that say that when you actually try to separate out the effects of parents' educational level, mother's education is generally MUCH more significant in child success.
Now, I have no doubt there are probably some studies out there which disagree, since this is a hard thing to measure. But it took me all of 5 seconds in a search engine to come up with half a dozen articles for the "research" you tried to imply doesn't exist.
"Just as the best way to ensure your kid sees reading as anything other than a chore is for you to read for pleasure regularly (for which read: pretty much whenever opportunity allows)."
I don't know if it's the BEST way, but it is *A* way.
Actually, it kinda *is* the BEST way.
There have been a lot of studies on this sort of thing. I remember in particular a study that looked at parental interventions vs. random aspects of home environment in their impacts on success in school and on standardized tests.
Things like "Parents make an effort to read to their kid every night" often don't make any statistically significant difference. But things like "Number of books in the home" have a high positive correlation with success for kids.
It's not that having huge number of books in your house magically transports that knowledge into kids' brains, of course. But homes with a lot of books are more likely to have parents who are curious people, read a lot, etc.
In other words -- your kids' success is mostly dependent on the kind of person you are, and much less so on active intervention parents take because they think some study said you should read to your kid every night.
Don't get me wrong: obviously you sound like you've done some great things with your kids, and that probably succeeded because you already are the kind of person with the creativity and thoughtfulness to make such an activity helpful. So keep doing what you're doing.
But when it comes to advising people IN GENERAL about the best thing they can do for their kids? Well, they should try to be the kind of person they want their kids to be, first and foremost. Before kids become teenagers, in particular, modeling is one of the most effective parental strategies.
It's plain and simple --- Wikipedia has lost its compass.
Maybe that's so, but Wikipedia always had a badly functioning compass anyway.
On average, it points about 22 degrees west of magnetic north, which was the "consensus" achieved among various editors about where the compass should point. An admin started a "sandbox compass" and after three weeks of edit wars, the "22-degree compromise" was drafted and largely holds. Well, except late on Friday nights, when edit wars erupt and the compass needle spirals randomly around.
Some knowledgeable guy once tried to fix the compass and make it actually point in the right direction, but there were three editors "squatting" on the compass and yanking the needle to make it keep sticking to 22 degrees west of north. When asked why they kept doing this, they just say, "Well, I can get home with this compass, so why should we change it? We need a verifiable source, and some weird assumed location for an invisible 'magnetic pole' doesn't sound very reliable to me."
Another guy even figured out a correction to post which would show how to find north even with Wikipedia's screwed up compass, but his contributions were deleted as "original research." Another guy tried to post the history of the compass and how it used to point differently from Wikipedia, but his contributions were declared "not notable" and summarily deleted forever.
Oh, and periodically, the compass rose that decorates the Wikipedia compass is replaced by an obscene graphic surrounding the needle labeled "PENUS AND BALZ, YEAH!"... it often remains like this for hours or days until some editor notices and corrects the vandalism.
But hey -- this is what you get when you have a free compass "that anyone can edit!"
One day, scientists and their followers will feel like complete idiots, when it becomes obvious aliens have been here all along.
Okay, one can play this game about any widespread "belief." Let's try, shall we?
One day, scientists and their followers will feel like complete idiots, when it becomes obvious God and Jesus have been here all along.
Citation#1: US presidents have known about UFOs here on Earth, even seen them:
Since the beginning of the US, US Presidents have been -- and continue to -- invoke a superior supernatural deity acting on Earth, usually to our country's benefit.
Citation#2: If 200+ NASA, Ex-Military, Ex-US government high ranking employees coming forth and willing to testify before congress isn't enough for you, then your mind is too closed:
I can find thousands and thousands of NASA, Ex-military, Ex-US government high ranking employees to talk about how belief in the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ is not only present in the world, but often is responsible for their entire success in life.
Citation#3: How many pilot witnesses with radar evidence to back it up does it take before you belive that UFOs are real and here on Earth?
How many miracles certified by the Vatican does it take for you to believe in an almighty deity? (The Vatican employs lots of actual scientists and doctors to certify these too.)
Citation#4: Is 3 Million alien abductions in the USA alone enough evidence for you, or are you waiting around for a nice round number like 10 million?
Yes, and hundreds of millions of people around the world believe that bread or a wafer is magically transformed into the body of someone who lived 2000 years ago, and by practicing ritual cannibalism and consuming his body and blood, they will be saved an afterlife of eternal torment. And hundreds of milions of others think the first group is crazy, but they believe in their own tradition pointing to a supernatural god or gods. Etc.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm NOT saying God isn't real, nor am I saying definitively that aliens have not visited earth.
But you have to admit that there are good reasons why many scientists have become increasingly skeptical of religious claims in the past few centuries -- largely due to the nature of the "evidence," which always seems a little fleeting or hard to capture in controlled experiments or whatever.
It is indeed rational to present a similar skepticism to claims like millions of people in the US are supposedly "abducted." How? When? Don't other people in their families notice? Why would aliens be doing this? How many government officials would have to be in on this conspiracy theory to keep it quiet? Why hasn't anyone been able to produce clear evidence of these things?
Here's the problem -- there are other explanations. You go back more than a century, and rather than alien abductions, people believed in other kinds of noctural weirdness, from incubi to succubi to various other demons or ghosts or fairies or whatever. There are well-known phenomena of sleep paralysis, which occur when your body's motor control turns off, but sometimes the conscious brain is still a little aware. This has happened to me a number of times in my life -- and I've even had dreams and nightmares that correspond to those times, sometimes where I've "felt a presence" or whatever nonsense... but I recognize these things as nightmares combined with well-known physiological phenomena... I don't blame them on aliens.
Isn't it interesting that all of these "abductions" started soaring just about the time that UFOs and sci-fi stories became all the rage? And the old stories about demonic visitation, etc. just happen to disappear at the same time?
Humans have an incredible propensity to look for patterns in randomness, and to try to ascribe meaning to phenomena even if t
Slashdot Mirror
Although there are several ways that they can be delivered, the most typical model is where students watch instructional material online by themselves, then do their homework in class. It seems to me that this would be an ideal situation for an introvert.
Perhaps. But it depends on what you mean by "do their homework in class." If this just means students working individually on assignments while a teacher walks around and helps them, then yes, it's probably a good model for introverts.
In practice, though, most "flipped" teaching involves more than just individual students working on their own in a classroom. Most instructors try to make use of various in-class activities and assessments that differ from a traditional "work alone on your own" homework assignment. This often involves interacting with neighboring students at a minimum ("check your neighbor!" or "discuss your opinion of the answer with them for 1 minute" or whatever), and likely various forms of "group work" or collaborations.
Many if not most instructors who adopt a "flipped" classroom are likely producing situations that result in much MORE social interaction during learning. So, in practice, I don't think flipped learning is going to get rave reviews from most introverts.
"Collaborative learning," "project-based learning," any kind of focus on groups or group projects, and so on are often a teaching buzzwords for "Put all the kids in a group so the smart kids can carry the dumb kids and then on paper it looks like everyone is doing well."
That's probably the most cynical way of putting it. A well-organized group project with proper evaluation and assessment can do more than that. Part of the problem is finding suitable types of projects for group work. Projects that are open-ended, exploratory, require experimentation (and often benefit from people with different ideas for approaches) -- group work can be good there.
With younger children -- who haven't yet become so utterly cynical about education and haven't bought into the American malaise of anti-intellectualism -- groups of different ability levels can be incredibly beneficial. It's a common approach in many Montessori and private school classrooms, where grade levels are often combined to everyone's benefit. The younger or slower kids watch the older and smarter kids, and they often have an innate capacity to help each other learn together.
Here is the way a "group project" worked at my old school:
I empathize with your description; I recall many similar situations in school myself. Part of the problem is the cultural divide I mentioned above -- many older kids and teenagers simply don't value excellence in education.
But another major flaw in your description is the lack of an appropriate assessment. "Dumb and mediocre kids" shouldn't get an "A" just because the overall work of a group gets an "A." Learning should be tested via a separate assessment -- whether an individual report or a test on the material learned through the group project or whatever.
Group work shouldn't be a vehicle to give everyone an "A." It's a different learning strategy, which can sometimes be helpful with proper guidance from a teacher. The results of the group should not be substituted for an individual assessment strategy, and if you had teachers who did that, you're probably correct that it wasn't the best method of education.
Aaah excellent more maker hate from randos on the internet. I don't get the sheer level of vitriol aimed at people who instead of sitting on their arses watching TV or whining on the internet actually get up and do something with their time. Jealousy, perhaps?
GP does come across as unnecessarily insulting. That's not a justification for ad hominem in return, though.
A few things:
(1) There *IS* a significant difference between the modern "maker" and the traditional "craftsman." In general, the sense I get of the maker movement is that it does not focus on specialization -- rather on general familiarity with a wide variety of tools, equipment, and approaches. This is quite different from a traditional craftsman, who might spend years apprenticing to learn a specific subset of skills, then decades perfecting those skills. One cannot compare a "maker" who learned how to use a power saw last week to help with his random electronics project that has a wood frame with a carpenter who has been doing complex woodworking for 25 years. I think that's kinda the point GP was making, even if it was expressed poorly. And it's a legitimate point.
(2) Of the few self-identified "makers" I've conversed with for any period of time, most of them have in fact come across as pretentious dilettantes who don't really know much of anything about traditional crafts. Yet they act like all of their knowledge is so powerful and deep. I'm not claiming my sample is representative, but it is what I've observed.
(3) I have absolutely nothing against most of the "maker" goals. Being familiar with "how stuff works" and "how to do things" used to be, well, common knowledge. Reviving these skills and encouraging inventiveness and creativity with physical objects is in general a very good thing.
(4) That said, because of my experiences with the pretentious idiots above, I would never want anyone to refer to me as a "maker," despite the fact that I value many of the same skills and have for decades. I also don't consider that most of my skills qualify me for any special title -- they're just general purpose things that any person should be familiar with, like basic woodworking, mechanical know-how, electronics, etc. Just because I've built some of my own things out of wood and tend to take apart an electric device to try to fix it (rather than throwing it out right away and buying a new one) doesn't grant me any special status -- it's just living life and being a well-rounded person with some practical skills.
What I find particularly unattractive about the "maker" designation is how they've tried to co-opt every person who does just about anything and try to act like they are part of this "movement." Recently, when I told someone that I bake bread rather than buy it from the store, ferment stuff, experiment with making soft cheeses, occasionally can things, and do a few other things in the kitchen, they asked whether I was a "maker."
What the heck? No -- I'm doing exactly what my grandmother did. It's practical, useful skills in my kitchen that save me money and frankly produce food that tastes better than anything I can buy in grocery store.
Have you ever sewn something? Have you ever made your own soap? Do you compost in your backyard? Apparently, you too can be a maker.
For some people, it's gotten to the point that having any basic practical skill which most people send out to a 3rd party turns you into a "maker."
And most of the time, the emphasis that I've heard from the self-identified "makers" I know is on simplicity and deliberate avoidance of advanced skills. The typical "maker" isn't striving to create a beautiful ornate cabinet with inlaid wood of four different colors -- no... the "maker" wants to be able have a "recipe" that chops up a pre-fabricated door into seven parts and reassembles it as an ugly, but functional cabinet in an afterno
I guess it would be better for the terminal. "I see you're trying to invoke sudo, would you like the man pages for that?"
If Clippy was available for the terminal in Linux, I'm sure it would just be full of random Easter eggs, coupled with its general pattern of random annoyance. I can just see it now...
[After a few minutes of inactivity...]
It looks like you're trying to take a break. Can I help?
~/ $ Clippy, leave me alone
Malfunction. Need input.
~/ $ Fine. Clippy -- make me a sandwich
I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that.
~/ $ sudo make me a sandwich
Okay.
Would you like some coffee with that?
~/ $ Now you're talking, Clippy. Yeah, get me some coffee with extra milk.
No milk. This Clippy does not have Super Cow Powers.
Etc., etc...
That sound you heard was the OP's point whooshing over your head. Nobody is debating that it's an astronomical event - only that it's a non-event, of no actual significance beyond generating media hype.
It depends on what you mean by "actual significance." Sure, nothing is colliding tonight. No major astronomical bodies are being destroyed with the force of millions of nuclear explosions or anything.
But astronomy is primarily an observational science. People who are interested in astronomy generally get all excited about "rare events," which generally happen at least once per month -- "ooh, there's a conjunction of X and Y!" or "this is the closest approach of X and Y for the next 18 years!"
That IS what most amateur astronomers consider "actual significance." It's sort of like birdwatching -- where it's fun to spot something "rare" or whatever. (I'm personally not that into it, though I have found it mildly interesting in the past.)
Anyhow, a total lunar eclipse -- while not that uncommon -- is already the most interesting astronomical event that laypeople can easily observe. I myself have been surprised by them a number of times -- I'm just driving along at night and happen to turn in the direction of the full moon, and there it is with the tell-tale orange-ish or red-ish hue, or with an apparent chunk out of it.
This one happens to occur when the moon is somewhat bigger and brighter, so yeah, it's probably one of the most interesting and visible astronomical events that most people would ever bother to look at. Most other things that get even amateur astronomy buffs interested would require a telescope or at least binoculars and some knowledge of the sky. But any 5-year-old can point up tonight and say, "Hey Mom -- Look! The moon is red!! Cool!"
Is that of "actual significance"? Depends on your definition. But it's at least mildly cool. And if it gets some kids interested in science, what the heck is your problem with it? It's not "media hype" to point out one of the most visible astronomical phenomena.
What, exactly, is useful about memorizing facts, in a world where any fact you want is at your fingertips on demand? Being usefully conversant in facts is not about memorization, it's about understanding relationships between things. Understanding how stuff works.
I agree with you that the "understanding relationships" etc. is more important in being an educated person than memorized rote knowledge.
The problem, however, is that one actually needs something in your brain to "understand relationships" between. You can't "understand how stuff works" if you don't even know there is "stuff" to begin with.
I'm absolutely NOT arguing for lots of rote memorization. But I think a common error (and an increasingly serious problem) today is the idea that memorization is worthless because... well, "Google can answer it." Yeah, that's great if you're looking up some atomic fact. But what if finding an answer to a problem depends on connecting seemingly unrelated atomic facts? If they are both in your brain, you may be able to figure it out. But if not, you're out of luck (unless someone has solved that exact problem before and posted it on the internet).
Traditional specialization in a career, for example, usually required adaptability. If you were a mechanic or a machinist or whatever, having 25 years of experience wasn't just about making fewer mistakes -- it was about having a brain full of knowledge that could make such connections when needed. That often included a lot of obscure facts derived from experience... "Oh, don't even bother trying that part on that model, because it uses X and although they say it's different from Y, both the mechanisms on based on principle Z."
Memorization can SOMETIMES be a way to fast-track understanding and make those subsequent connections easier to make. Memorization for the sake of memorization is stupid, but if you're memorizing information that you can actually use on a regular basis, it might actually be helpful in doing stuff like you say: "understanding relationships between things" requires knowing something about "things."
The facts you need will be memorized along the way.
That does tend to happen when you use information frequently. But sometimes it can actually be helpful to force oneself to KNOW stuff in advance. (I can't believe I actually need to argue for this....) And sometimes you don't know what you might need to know, and knowing SOMETHING that is potentially relevant can give you an advantage over someone else who just has to blindly Google things rather than actually knowing anything.
In medieval times, when books were expensive and scarce, there used to be an entire "art of memory," a method which facilitated memorization of long passages of writings and even entire books. There were drawings showing people "eating books" too -- this was the symbolism given to the act of memorization, because once one had these complete texts in one's brain, it allows a much more thorough "digestion" of the ideas and contents of these texts.
I'm not saying that we should go back to that. But there's something different about knowledge that is actually in your brain, and memorization can sometimes be a useful TOOL to get it there.
Science isn't supposed to be fun. It's a method and its rigorous.
Scientific education can very well be fun. The best way to convince people ignorant of science that the scientific method is useful is by doing exploratory exercises with them (often "fun") and then gradually introducing rigor to show them how scientific methods work better.
I speak as someone who has taught high-school science. One of the first activities I would do with physics students was to give them a few different types of pendula and a stopwatch. I would divide them into groups and tell them to come up with a way of predicting what the period should be.
That's about all the instructions I gave.
They'd get a few days of this -- I'd bring the class together at the end of each period, and we'd talk about what they had discovered. Hmm -- the mass of the weight at the end of the string didn't seem to matter. The initial angle didn't seem to make much of a difference either. Etc.
I'd walk around the room in each class and gradually give suggestions and hints on better ways to collect and organize data, answer questions, provide additional equipment upon request, etc.
By the end of a week, most of them had learned more about the scientific method than many physics students do in a year (if they only performed calculations and solved equations). And most of them found it interesting -- it was a puzzle to solve, a physical thing that they were expected to figure out how it worked. Once one group figured out that graphing their data might help, all of sudden someone would realize it was a parabola... and pretty soon they could come up with an equation.
Exploratory science is essential for education -- that's how little kids learn. But many of them have is stomped out of them by middle school, forced to sit in desks and learn things by rote or by doing dozens of repetitive exercises. There is certainly a place for memorization and repetition, but there's no reason why science can't also include fun exploratory activities.
You can talk about the definition of a "theory" or "hypothesis" or whatever until you're blue in the face, but nothing beats making kids actually have to DO IT.
Science is treated like a religion, and the philosophy of science and especially its skepticism is missing in the discussion, covered instead by "omg isn't this science looking thing cool".
And this is precisely the problem with science education that isn't fun and exploratory in nature. If kids spend years sitting in science classrooms being dictated to and told the "facts" of science, when and how exactly are they supposed to acquire the skills to form and evaluate their own hypotheses with appropriate skepticism? If they never try to do it, how would you expect people to be able to do it regarding other science they encounter in the world in their lives?
Of course those sorts of skills are hard to test on things like standardized tests, so teachers in many public schools feel like they don't have time to actually train kids in the actual process of DOING science, rather than memorizing facts ABOUT it.
Pseudoscience abounds. Looks at nutrition science. You can't even tell anymore what is actual science and what is total nonsense based on anecdote... because the methods are almost the same.
I'm not sure precisely what you're referencing. Nutrition science, properly speaking, is NOT based on "anecdote" more than anything else -- it requires data collection, control groups, data analysis, etc.
But the big problem with much of science -- and not just nutrition, but medicine in general, and psychology, and most "social science" (increasingly even harder sciences) -- is the substitution of (badly done) statistical procedures for any semblance of experimental judgment. We now live in a world where we act as though simple statistics can "do science" for us -- and we have all the thin
sorry man, accounting ledgers are double entry, spreadsheets are not. they are planning tools, not accounting tools at heart
What the heck are you talking about? Your post shows a great ignorance of classical accounting, as well as spreadsheets (which, by the way, historically ARE derived from accounting books, despite what you may think).
Anyhow, a few other points to note:
-- Old-school paper double-entry accounting often uses plenty of single-entry books as well, often known as journals or daybooks (though informally they are often called "ledgers" too). They are essential bookkeeping records as well.
-- It's a trivial exercise to set up a computer spreadsheet to do double-entry accounting, either using multiple sheets or the same sheet. If you can't figure out how to do that, you don't know how to use a spreadsheet -- like someone who thinks a teacher needs a dedicated "grading software" program to calculate averages or curves or "drop the lowest grade."
-- Early computerized spreadsheets were designed to imitate traditional accounting ledgers and other books organized in tabular format. They were deliberately made in a very general format that could be modified to imitate any of a number of tradition record-keeping books.
-- You are at least somewhat correct that early on people realized their usefulness for planning and projection purposes as well -- but those sorts of tasks (budgeting, etc.) were traditionally done in tabular form as well... it's just that paper books didn't have the flexibility to instantly recompute.
--Any business who actually needs the complexity of double-entry accounting today generally uses dedicated accounting software. That's true. But it's not because one couldn't set up a spreadsheet to do most tasks. It certainly would be an easier task than setting up and manually recording numbers in physical record books a couple generations ago. But dedicated accounting software comes with pre-packaged solutions and databases with better record-handling than simple spreadsheets.
-- Lastly, if you doubt that spreadsheets could be used for double-entry accounting, you can do a quick internet search and find a number of solutions designed to load directly in Excel that do precisely that.
You can rest easy, though. So many illiterate people have taken up "bold-faced" in lieu of "bald-faced"/"bare-faced" that it is rapidly becoming perfectly accepted.
This is a very specific linguistic phenomenon, known to usage experts these days as an eggcorn (itself a reference to people using the term eggcorn rather than acorn). There's an entry for bold-faced lie in the Eggcorn Database.
Eggcorns are interesting from a linguistic perspective, because they often involve three mechanisms which reinforce the change: (1) the new word or phrase sounds very similar to the old one, (2) the new word or phrase incorporates new elements that have a certain logical relationship to some meanings of the old word/phrase, and (3) the new components often substitute for archaic words or usage that often only have stuck around in obscure English idioms. (In this case, "bald" and "bold" sound similar, these types of lies often involve a sort of "boldness," and nobody uses the term "bald-faced" anymore outside of that idiom.)
Thus in tiny pieces a language is corrupted.
Meh. "Corruption" in language is a matter of perspective. Language naturally evolves. These types of "corruptions" have often been around for decades or even centuries. If they happen to date back more than a century or two, they're usually accepted as "legitimate English," even if their origin is as screwed up as your example (and often more so). If Shakespeare said it, by definition it's okay.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to hold to "standards," particularly in formal writing. But at some point these things become a lost cause. (See, for example, the word "decimate," which comes from a Latin practice of reduction by 1/10th, i.e., reducing to 90% of the original strength or size. NOBODY uses the word to mean this anymore -- instead implying a much greater reduction in size, if not complete destruction -- and if you try to imply the original meaning outside of describing Roman army practices, no one would understand your meaning. Outside of specific historical usage, "decimate" simply means something else now.)
And sometimes the people who complain about linguistic "decay" and "corruption" are the worst offenders -- in their zeal to "fix" English and stamp out usages that sound wrong to them, they often end up creating their own stupid errors.
It's one of the reasons English spelling is so screwed up. See here for a few quick examples of common English words where pretentious idiots tried to make English conform to a mistaken "rule" and added silent letters to words for no apparent reason.
TL;DR -- You're right, and careful writers should take heed. But easy on the "corruption" rant, lest you become a greater danger to English than those you criticize.
And THIS is the problem with spreadsheets, people are using them for columnar text formatting, for lists and the like, and NOT calculations.
Uh, spreadsheets aren't just for calculations, and they never have been. They're for any kind of data storage or manipulation which could benefit from organization into columns and rows. That includes things like lists of records with text fields (like names) that might benefit from data manipulation (like sorting alphabetically or whatever).
In case you don't realize this, spreadsheets derive from accounting ledgers, which similarly held RECORDS. Calculations was one thing they could be used for, such as keeping a running tab on an account balance or whatever. But they also often were a place to consolidate various information, such as invoice lists of names, addresses, other customer data, etc.
Keeping a list of attendees for a party seems like a fine usage for a spreadsheet. Sure, a dedicated calendar app might have more specific functionality, but only if you want those functions. If all is needed is a place to store data in an organized fashion, why NOT a spreadsheet?
(And before you start complaining about how modern Excel is a bloated piece of crap, I'll happily agree with you -- but the ability to format text and column cells is important even if you want to do the most basic reporting with data involving calculations. So, you can hardly dispense with most of that and still end up with an application that anyone would want to use. People adopted spreadsheets because they could store data conveniently in a useful format -- if all they wanted was calculations, they could have just used a calculator or adding machine.)
Evertime there is a Hurricane Evacuation you get a couple dozen that die from car accidents or falling off ladders boarding up their houses to prevent looting, etc. That is one of the reasons politicians are wary of calling evacuations unless really needed.
And yet politicians also seem lined up to cheer for security "theatre" at airports, when it can result in similar indirect deaths and injuries.
What am I talking about? Despite the common fear of flying and airplane accidents, car accidents are MUCH, MUCH more common to result in death or serious injury. Some studies have indicated that people choosing to travel by car rather than plane in the months after 9/11 may have resulted in the deaths of over a thousand more people.
I know a number of people who fly less frequently now partly because of how annoying it is to deal with unnecessary airport security. I have made that choice myself a few times, particularly for shorter road trips (say, less than 5-6 hours) where I'd be tempted to take a shuttle and fly before. Now it's just not worth the extra hassle and time -- I usually allow a lot more time than I used to pre-9/11 when showing up to the airport, in case the security lines are long or some idiot shuts them down with a water bottle or doesn't take his shoes off. And I have to be much more careful about what I pack or carry on with me -- in my car, I can bring whatever I want.
Anyhow, there are many estimates that road traffic increased by a few percent (particularly around holidays) due to people avoiding airports and TSA hassles. Driving is significantly less safe than flying. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the TSA has indirectly caused the deaths of hundreds or even thousands of people due to these kinds of decisions.
Anyhow -- going back to hurricanes, there are plenty of other reasons why politicians may be hesitant to call for evacuation. It does lead to panic. But it also generally increases spending on emergency services (something that requires more tax dollars, something politicians don't want to have to raise), while simultaneously moving people out of their jurisdictions, where they don't patronize local businesses for days (and, as you point out, looting can make things even worse), even with a "false alarm." People lose income as well if they evacuate for something that turns out to be a "false alarm," which also can be a hit for the local economy. Thus, the local economy takes a hit, the government budget takes a hit in providing extra services... all economic problems that politicians want to avoid unless absolutely necessary. I'm not saying they don't take unintended deaths into account, but that's probably not their primary concern.
We segregate by age...
Not really, high school and middle school are made up of different age ranges. Those ranges have more to do with protecting the younger from the older and reflect the physiological differences in the ages because of puberty.
Um, how many students graduate high school outside of the specified state-mandated kindergarten start date of their age cohort? Maybe a few percent at most? There may be some mixture of ages in higher grades, but mostly students are stuck in a group of students who are within one year of their age... regardless of intellectual level. Yes -- it's possible in most schools to move out of that system for particular students, but it is considered abnormal (and thus introduces excessive social problems often because it is considered so abnormal).
It isn't segregation it is grouping to help students and educators. Those groupings can be ignored for special cases.
Note that these are precisely the same claims that were made when white and black schools were deliberately segregated. Segregation is almost always justified as being helpful to the those who are forced to be segregated -- blacks were considered inferior, and thus obviously it would be easier on them and on their teachers to separate them out.
Our rather rigid age segregation in most public schools results in a lot of harm, in my opinion. Look at studies, for example, on students who are born in spring vs. fall. Just because students start kindergarten at roughly 5.5 years instead of roughly 5 years often makes a large developmental difference in outcomes, even as late as high school. Then look at the outliers and see how they are affected. Age segregation may be the "best" system of segregation for educational purposes, but I think the evidence is far from as conclusive as you act.
Segregating by sex is a different beast. What you are saying is that girls are too weak to be in the same class room as boys to enjoy CS. I call bullshit.
I said NO SUCH THING. Please re-read my comment. I quote:
The question is whether the differences in behavior, interest, and educational quality coming from segregation by sex in this particular education context are enough to justify the separation. I don't know whether they are or not...
I also in no way said that "girls were too weak to be in the same class room" -- I said that adolescent behavioral studies have shown that girls act DIFFERENTLY when in girls-only situations, and that SOME studies have concluded that there are some features which MAY have educational advantages.
I would also note that some of these same studies have claimed that boys-only classes do WORSE than mixed classrooms. (Others have claimed no significant effect, or a mild trend to toward the opposite.)
Pretending that adolescent boys and adolescent girls are exactly the same is ridiculous. And refusing to acknowledge that there are odd social interactions that happen between sexes during adolescence is even more ridiculous.
I'm NOT arguing in favor of segregating by sex. I'm saying that we know classroom dynamics are altered in mixed classrooms vs. all-girls or all-boys classrooms. Just like classroom dynamics would be altered if you threw 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders together, compared to segregating by age. There are positives and negatives to lots of these things, and maybe we should think about them, because there are major physical and psychological differences between sexes, particularly during puberty.
And lastly, by the way, lest you think I'm somehow prejudiced against girls here, it's precisely the opposite -- the argument that the studies I mentioned make is basically that girls often mature a little faster and could benefit from being separated from a bunch of disruptive male idiots who are still too immature to allow a place for the wisdom of their female counterparts in their (segregated) age cohort.
If you don't "get" the power of compounding, PLEASE look it up. It's one of the most powerful forces which affects your financial security.
Uh, what are you talking about? My calculations included compounding, as could be easily verified it you tried yourself.
If it were simple interest, the 1% every 3 days would only earn approximately 121% per year. As I said in my calculations, it's well over 200% per year. Why? Compounding.
You wanna be a jerk? Fine -- but be sure you have a freakin' clue of what you're talking about first.
Wait, 1.01^121 (every third day) is 3.3 So we are talking about THREE HUNDERT percent a year. Never mind.
It's unclear where TFS got its numbers. TFA says:
claiming he would pay investors one percent interest on their investment every three days, or seven percent a week.
I'm guessing that the article is implying these are two different options? Because obviously 1% every 3 days != 7% per week.
The first option (assuming a year length of 365.25 days) gives the result of about $336 with an initial $100 investment, making a net profit (annual return) of about 236%.
The second option gives about $3414 with a $100 investment, resulting in an annual return of 3314%, which is at least in the ballpark of the number of 3641% listed in TFS.
If he were offering these two separate options, it seems insane to take the first one. And if TFS somehow screwed up the math and is trying to describe the same thing... well, I have no clue what the actual return was supposed to be.
Segregation is the answer. Sometimes groups need a space where they can be away from the things that are giving them problems, with the goal of later re-integration.
You heard it here first. Up next, white only bathrooms, and asian only programing camps.
We already segregate in education.
We segregate by age, often sorting kids into arbitrary "boxes" depending on their birthdays. It's usually quite difficult and disruptive to break out of age segregation in the public school system.
We segregate by ability level, placing students in "honors" classes or better "sections" of students, which has both benefits (teachers can tailor lessons more) and drawbacks (once a kid gets sorted in the "lower" section, it can be difficult for him/her ever to catch up to the higher section, even if very motivated and a "late bloomer" in terms of interest/ability).
These types of segregation are based on particular beliefs about age-based schemes of development and supposed goals of tracking based on previous student performance. They're well-accepted as legitimate, but obviously they fail to provide the best benefit in many cases of particular students.
The question about segregation is whether or not the overall differences justify the separation. Generally, the differences in black and white humans, for example, would NOT justify separate bathrooms (obviously).
We know that boys and girls develop physically, psychologically, socially, and intellectually on somewhat different timescales as adolescents. We know that adolescence is often a time of heightened sexual tension and awkwardness, which can result in significant differences in behaviors between segregated sex groups vs. mixed ones. We have studies that have shown both benefits and drawbacks of segregating sexes in education -- for one example, adolescent girls often are more deferential or less likely to assert their own opinions in a mixed group compared to an all-girls group. This can impact whether girls speak up to ask questions or to offer their opinion in class exercises, etc.
So, the question is not whether we should allow segregation -- we already allow segregation according to some schemes based on broad criteria (like age). If we got rid of age segregation and went back to a "one-room schoolhouse" model, it would inevitably be beneficial to some students, fo example. (Many private schools and Montessori-based schools take this approach, having classrooms that span 2-4 "grade levels," which often benefits both the young kids, who learn by watching older kids, and the older kids, who reinforce their knowledge through teaching and explanation.)
The question is whether the differences in behavior, interest, and educational quality coming from segregation by sex in this particular education context are enough to justify the separation. I don't know whether they are or not, but acting like "all segregation is bad" or refusing to acknowledge that we already do it is needlessly inflammatory and unproductive.
Something tells me Ed Regis isn't about to climb Everest either.
And why should he, exactly?
I'm not being a troll here, nor am I trying to dissuade anyone from their mountain-climbing hobbies. I've enjoyed climbing on small scales myself, though mostly I prefer hiking (even on more difficult terrain).
Anyhow, I can see some idea of "human achievement" in having the first person summit Everest. On the other hand, this was achieved in the days before we had robots or planes or whatever to do the exploring for us.
But nowadays, you're talking about investing a huge amount of time and energy and money (probably $50k or more), not to mention the resources required to get there, the litter most hikers leave on the mountain (including garbage, human waste, etc. which especially befouls the most popular -- and now frequently crowded -- routes), etc.
And even if you make it to base camp, you have only about a 50% chance of getting to the top. And now you have a lot of random idiots with minimal climbing experience who want to do it too.
What does it prove? You're a badass?
I'm all for people having goals. But I for one would be happy if fewer idiots were leaving their garbage trails on Everest just to have some sort of "notch in their belt." A hundred years from now, we'll probably look at many of these climbers today as many people look at the dentist who killed a lion recently... yeah, it was awesome to go on "big game" hunts and collect trophies in Africa 100 years ago, but is that really a practice that we should put so much cultural value on anymore?
Going to Mars is a similar exercise in human folly unless or until we can find a way to make it legitimately sustainable and useful, rather than just some sort of random "goal" to do "just because it's there." Decades ago when Azimov and other writers were imagining bases on Mars, there was also a legitimate point to such exploration -- we needed humans to explore because the idea of robots or machines being sophisticated enough to do it for us was also far-fetched.
But imagine how much MORE we could learn about Mars if we invested the amounts of money necessary to transport a human mission there into really developing better robotics with the equipment and sustainability to do serious testing there. And after a more thorough analysis of some possibilities and further exploration, we could make a determination about whether it would at all be feasible or useful to send humans there.
Of course, that would be logical and probably the most efficient use of funds, research, and effort -- but humans are not known for being logical or efficient. And lots of funds will only materialize with the notion of human exploration... even if it's another quest for some crazy humans to put a "notch on their belt."
Well, it has a little bit more than space, it has gravity, which seems to be important for various life process (of both man and plants).
Yes, but there's a well-known solution of a rotating space station to produce artificial gravity, an idea that has been around for more than a century.
The main problem is just funding the thing. But the amount of funds, resources, and amount of stuff needed to be launched into space to create a rotating space station is about as feasible as establishing a semi-permanent settlement on Mars. But travel to and from a rotating space station would be a LOT easier.
i dont see what these people are upset about. i mean, this is just a vision of your future if trump were to be President. ;)
Agreed. How is this a surprise? I'm sure the Trump campaign just used the same formula for calculating donations that it uses to calculate Trump's net worth -- take the actual value and multiply it by some random number. After all, Trump's "brand" is apparently worth billions of dollars, but Trump's the only one who thinks so.
Hey Trump donors -- you just figured out how math works in Trump's world.
The explanation wasn't very clear, but I think this is how it works.
Student in 2015: "We charge you $34k tutition, but you are eligible for $20k grant, so you pay us $14k."
Same student in 2016: "We charge you $20k tuition, but you are eligible for $6k grant, so you pay us $14k"
Yes, that's the gist of it. But there's a lot of stuff that goes into that word "grant." College budgets are very complex, and there's a lot of reasons why those "grants" can be useful to move money around.
For one example, rich colleges with big endowments (over a billion dollars) generally pay at least 1/3 of that tuition "grant" money with endowment money.
Why would they do this? Sometimes because they have to. Endowment management often involves weird operations akin to money-laundering. Donors often give money that's earmarked for particular things, and for the college to actually make use of that money in their general budget, they need to find a way to funnel the money out of the endowment.
Tuition is an important factor for many richer colleges here. Let's say that you have a couple who has a decent amount of money that they want to give to the school. They're not rich enough to pay for a building or anything like that, but they'd like something smaller that they can put their name on.
So, they fund the "Jimmie and Maggie Stewart Scholarship in Basketweaving Studies," which can pay out $10,000 per year to some lucky undergraduate basketweaver (or perhaps a few of them, divvied up).
Jimmie and Maggie get a lot of "bang for their buck" here -- they get to feel good about funding undergraduate education, and often colleges will ask students who receive scholarships to write a letter of thanks or at least information to the donors periodically and/or host some "donor cocktail hours" or whatever where the donors get to mingle with the happy undergraduates and see where their money is going.
But now the college needs to get that money into its general funds to use it. So it has an incentive to "award the scholarship." On the other hand, the college can "double-dip" here by increasing tuition at the same time. Before the student paid $20k or whatever with no grant, but now the tuition can be $30k with a $10k scholarship, so the student gets a "scholarship" and is happy because they think they are getting a "deal" (and something to put on a resume), the donors are happy because they think they are helping students succeed in this era of high tuition, and the college actually increased its effective annual revenue by 50% for this student.
Most of the situations with endowments aren't that direct -- donors give money that's not earmarked for individual scholarships, but perhaps it's meant to go toward "undergraduate education" or whatever. (And many alumni often tend to feel the best about their undergrad experience, so they might donate toward that.)
Again, the school could try to use that money for direct expenses, like building a new gym or whatever, but then they have to justify it to endowment managers as directly relevant to "undergraduate education" -- is the new gym really necessary? Maybe... maybe not. But "tuition" really is considered "necessary" for undergraduate education, so if you give that money as a "grant" to a student to lower tuition, then the money flows directly from the endowment and back to the general college funds... where it can used to pay for the new climbing gym or another administrator's salary or whatever.
And that's just one type of "shell game" that goes on... but it's an important one for richer schools. Tuition hikes at smaller schools may have other pools of money or grants or whatever involved that having a "higher tuition" allows them to use more freely. Meanwhile, schools obviously have incentives to charge higher "official" tuition, since they can squeeze that money out of richer families and thus actually increase income.
What's going on in this case is a smaller schoo
Because the problem in both cases is not PAYING for these things, it is in the COST for these things. Changing who pays does not address the problem. As a matter of fact, as the government has picked up ever more of the cost of both healthcare and education, the cost has risen ever more rapidly.
Your statement is somewhat misleading. The problem with your assertion is that we currently have the worst possible situation, i.e., a partially-regulated solution where the government partially funds things. That's generally vastly worse from a regulatory and cost standpoint than full (or near-full) government funding.
Another problem is that in both of your situations the government has deliberately introduced "middle men" into the transactions that obscure costs and give motivations to inflate costs.
Example: public higher-ed in the mid 1900s often had a lot more direct state funding. Costs were kept low because state representatives demanded it (in representing taxpayers) and state governments had a big "stake" in providing affordable education.
But then you introduce huge federal student loan programs that provide a giant tap of free-flowing money to irrational parents and students who are willing to take their dollars anywhere to get ahead. Colleges (both public and private) now realize they can charge more tuition, and often they have to because state funding starts declining significantly. Many colleges ultimate start to take advantage of this situation to funnel money into their budgets by getting students and parents to take out bigger loans.
By distributing the costs among hoards of "middlemen" (parents and students) who all have different agendas and policies, colleges can grab ever more government money. That just wasn't true when the state was funding public colleges to a greater level through DIRECT taxpayer support -- in that case, the colleges would need to convince state representatives to raise taxes and pay more to the college, which was a much harder sell.
The problem isn't the government funding in terms of increasing costs -- it's the indirect nature of it all.
Something similar could be said for insurance, by the way. Compare the administrative costs for a "single-payer" system like Medicare to the costs for private insurance companies. Medicare costs a FRACTION of what private insurance companies skim off the top in "administrative fees" (i.e., profits), not to mention all the extra money that goes in paying for staff at hospitals and doctors' offices to argue with insurance companies and try to understand the multitude of difference types of policies just to get procedures approved for patients.
Once again, the problem with healthcare costs is the appearance of "middlemen," this time the insurance companies. Who has an incentive to lower costs here? Consumers don't generally pay much attention to their bills, because it's mostly a negotiation between a bunch of other parties -- the consumer just pays the premium and lets everyone else sort out the details, which means there's less consumer oversight. Meanwhile, both healthcare providers AND insurance companies have incentives to raise costs (particularly now with Obamacare, where "administrative" fees to insurers are capped by percentage, so insurers now actually have an incentive to drive up healthcare fees in order to increase profits).
I'm NOT saying the necessary solution is full government intervention or regulation, but the reason for the rapidly rising costs and market inefficiency is not due to government intervention per se, but by the introduction of unregulated or partially regulated middlemen (student loan customers and insurance companies).
Some research suggests it's only one parent - the mother - and her level of education that has an effect on future educational out comes.
If this "research" actually existed, you could have provided a link to it. Yet you didn't.
Don't be a jerk. In your previous post, you only provided a link to a random blog, which was reporting on a book that discussed a study, rather than an actual source. And the blog even disagreed with your conclusion!
Meanwhile, somebody replies and tries to add something, and you act like a complete jerk, with you scare quotes around "research" for no apparent reason.
Do a freakin' internet search, Bill. Top 20 hits on a search like "mother's education impact on child", I found at least 4 or 5 more reputable sources than your random blog that say that when you actually try to separate out the effects of parents' educational level, mother's education is generally MUCH more significant in child success.
Now, I have no doubt there are probably some studies out there which disagree, since this is a hard thing to measure. But it took me all of 5 seconds in a search engine to come up with half a dozen articles for the "research" you tried to imply doesn't exist.
"Just as the best way to ensure your kid sees reading as anything other than a chore is for you to read for pleasure regularly (for which read: pretty much whenever opportunity allows)."
I don't know if it's the BEST way, but it is *A* way.
Actually, it kinda *is* the BEST way.
There have been a lot of studies on this sort of thing. I remember in particular a study that looked at parental interventions vs. random aspects of home environment in their impacts on success in school and on standardized tests.
Things like "Parents make an effort to read to their kid every night" often don't make any statistically significant difference. But things like "Number of books in the home" have a high positive correlation with success for kids.
It's not that having huge number of books in your house magically transports that knowledge into kids' brains, of course. But homes with a lot of books are more likely to have parents who are curious people, read a lot, etc.
In other words -- your kids' success is mostly dependent on the kind of person you are, and much less so on active intervention parents take because they think some study said you should read to your kid every night.
Don't get me wrong: obviously you sound like you've done some great things with your kids, and that probably succeeded because you already are the kind of person with the creativity and thoughtfulness to make such an activity helpful. So keep doing what you're doing.
But when it comes to advising people IN GENERAL about the best thing they can do for their kids? Well, they should try to be the kind of person they want their kids to be, first and foremost. Before kids become teenagers, in particular, modeling is one of the most effective parental strategies.
It's plain and simple --- Wikipedia has lost its compass.
Maybe that's so, but Wikipedia always had a badly functioning compass anyway.
On average, it points about 22 degrees west of magnetic north, which was the "consensus" achieved among various editors about where the compass should point. An admin started a "sandbox compass" and after three weeks of edit wars, the "22-degree compromise" was drafted and largely holds. Well, except late on Friday nights, when edit wars erupt and the compass needle spirals randomly around.
Some knowledgeable guy once tried to fix the compass and make it actually point in the right direction, but there were three editors "squatting" on the compass and yanking the needle to make it keep sticking to 22 degrees west of north. When asked why they kept doing this, they just say, "Well, I can get home with this compass, so why should we change it? We need a verifiable source, and some weird assumed location for an invisible 'magnetic pole' doesn't sound very reliable to me."
Another guy even figured out a correction to post which would show how to find north even with Wikipedia's screwed up compass, but his contributions were deleted as "original research." Another guy tried to post the history of the compass and how it used to point differently from Wikipedia, but his contributions were declared "not notable" and summarily deleted forever.
Oh, and periodically, the compass rose that decorates the Wikipedia compass is replaced by an obscene graphic surrounding the needle labeled "PENUS AND BALZ, YEAH!"... it often remains like this for hours or days until some editor notices and corrects the vandalism.
But hey -- this is what you get when you have a free compass "that anyone can edit!"
One day, scientists and their followers will feel like complete idiots, when it becomes obvious aliens have been here all along.
Okay, one can play this game about any widespread "belief." Let's try, shall we?
One day, scientists and their followers will feel like complete idiots, when it becomes obvious God and Jesus have been here all along.
Citation#1: US presidents have known about UFOs here on Earth, even seen them:
Since the beginning of the US, US Presidents have been -- and continue to -- invoke a superior supernatural deity acting on Earth, usually to our country's benefit.
Citation#2: If 200+ NASA, Ex-Military, Ex-US government high ranking employees coming forth and willing to testify before congress isn't enough for you, then your mind is too closed:
I can find thousands and thousands of NASA, Ex-military, Ex-US government high ranking employees to talk about how belief in the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ is not only present in the world, but often is responsible for their entire success in life.
Citation#3: How many pilot witnesses with radar evidence to back it up does it take before you belive that UFOs are real and here on Earth?
How many miracles certified by the Vatican does it take for you to believe in an almighty deity? (The Vatican employs lots of actual scientists and doctors to certify these too.)
Citation#4: Is 3 Million alien abductions in the USA alone enough evidence for you, or are you waiting around for a nice round number like 10 million?
Yes, and hundreds of millions of people around the world believe that bread or a wafer is magically transformed into the body of someone who lived 2000 years ago, and by practicing ritual cannibalism and consuming his body and blood, they will be saved an afterlife of eternal torment. And hundreds of milions of others think the first group is crazy, but they believe in their own tradition pointing to a supernatural god or gods. Etc.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm NOT saying God isn't real, nor am I saying definitively that aliens have not visited earth.
But you have to admit that there are good reasons why many scientists have become increasingly skeptical of religious claims in the past few centuries -- largely due to the nature of the "evidence," which always seems a little fleeting or hard to capture in controlled experiments or whatever.
It is indeed rational to present a similar skepticism to claims like millions of people in the US are supposedly "abducted." How? When? Don't other people in their families notice? Why would aliens be doing this? How many government officials would have to be in on this conspiracy theory to keep it quiet? Why hasn't anyone been able to produce clear evidence of these things?
Here's the problem -- there are other explanations. You go back more than a century, and rather than alien abductions, people believed in other kinds of noctural weirdness, from incubi to succubi to various other demons or ghosts or fairies or whatever. There are well-known phenomena of sleep paralysis, which occur when your body's motor control turns off, but sometimes the conscious brain is still a little aware. This has happened to me a number of times in my life -- and I've even had dreams and nightmares that correspond to those times, sometimes where I've "felt a presence" or whatever nonsense... but I recognize these things as nightmares combined with well-known physiological phenomena... I don't blame them on aliens.
Isn't it interesting that all of these "abductions" started soaring just about the time that UFOs and sci-fi stories became all the rage? And the old stories about demonic visitation, etc. just happen to disappear at the same time?
Humans have an incredible propensity to look for patterns in randomness, and to try to ascribe meaning to phenomena even if t
It's only hypocrisy if you think he's being snarky. He could be asking a serious question... which, honestly, is a legitimate one.