"I still believe that if no one dance the sun would not come back after winter. And I believe this not because no one can keep everyone from dancing at the solstice, but because it is pretty to think so. It matters not that reality does not fit the believe"
If you admit that reality does not fit this belief, then you don't really believe it, do you? What you have is a story that you like to tell, which is not the same thing. All you're doing in the post above is playing word games by not honoring the definition of "belief".
"Polls are garbage if you expect a 95%+ confidence interval."
What? Every political poll ever created is reported at exactly the 95% confidence interval.
For example, from the report linked by GGP post: "After taking into account the complex sample design, the average margin of sampling error on the 1,050 completed interviews with Muslims is +/-5 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence." (p. 57)
More generally, when reporting inferences from sample data you can always pick ANY confidence level you wish, and if it increases then the margin of error just gets bigger. Perhaps you meant to use some other phrase or idea in place of "95%+ confidence interval".
For what it's worth, more instruction in reading-as-its-own-thing can be counterproductive. What I've seen for reported research is that time spent on raw reading strategies ("find the main point", etc.) is productive up to about 10 hours and then doesn't give any more benefit. More productive is to get kids reading rich-content material in history and science and everything else, developing larger vocabularies, making more connections between more ideas and concepts. Neuroscientist Daniel Willingham phrases this, "Teaching content is teaching reading." Saying that we need to perfect reading in the abstract before broadening knowledge of the world is a waste of time and counterproductive -- like spinning tires in mud or dropping kids mentally into a sensory-deprivation tank.
"Critical thinking" is this mantra that has come to signify almost nothing. A peculiar CS-person fugue seems to be "education is never abstracted enough to satisfy me". People cannot think in the abstract without first thinking about something concrete. Lots of specific knowledge is what allows connections to be made.
"Knowledge comes into play mainly because if we want our students to learn how to think critically, they must have something to think about." [Daniel T. Willingham, American Educator]
My current employer told me, years after the fact, that I got an interview specifically because my cover letter seemed so literate. Quality writing is the level-zero evaluation (quick and accessible) for anyone's level of education and attention to detail.
More specifically, the idea of programming a computer and being simultaneously sloppy on syntax is pretty mind-boggling -- and from experience the code turned out by people like that, not caring about how they communicate with other people (if it compiles, it's committed), is pretty hellish.
My understanding is that's not the case. Satanism at least shares general allegiance to the overall Christian mythology. Atheists' rejection of the whole thing, in its very reasonableness, is far more threatening and terrifying to religious folk. From what I can tell.
"The reason the NSA metastasized into what it is now is because that is what the American people wanted. After (and before) the 9/11 attacks they wanted government protection from the big bad world."
There's this thing called "leadership". Yes, the unwashed masses are terrifyingly pliable -- they will go along with most anything the head honchos and media say together. The American people could accept a post 9-11 president saying "we need preventive war, offshore detention centers, and mass surveillance". The American people could also accept a post-Pearl Harbor president saying "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". The various elements of the Bush/Cheney doctrine existed years beforehand, and were only pushed to the fore by interested parties when they saw a time of volatility and weakness. The majority of the responsibility rests with individual leaders who made specific decisions at specific times to stab us in the back.
You need to carry the passport not to get into Canada but to return to the U.S.:
"Beginning in June 2009, all U.S. citizens will have to present a passport or other secure document that denotes identity and citizenship when entering the U.S. from Canada."
"Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt."
I think you give university administrators too much credit. Good or bad, they just want things cheap, and non-tenured positions are cheaper (and also easier to intimidate and get rid of arbitrarily; quite a bit like H1B visas). I had a dean literally laugh in my face once in a job interview when I said I was an excellent teacher with high student evaluations. "We don't care about that, we can get anybody off the street to teach a class," he said.
Summary: For the first time in 40 years, the City University of New York (CUNY) has started up a new community college, dedicated to novel teaching techniques. As part of that, they've refused to hire or grant any tenured faculty at all, not implemented departments or department chairs, not given faculty a vote in committees or any faculty senate structure, etc. The article writer is a long-time professor of math at another CUNY school, who was so excited by the prospect of trying new teaching techniques that he jumped ship anyway, despite concerns from colleagues. End of the story is that administration took away all their initial promises and there was nothing the faculty could do about it (for example: promise of 40% concentration on math studies, and one-on-one contact time between students and faculty, replaced by peer tutoring). This formerly excited professor is one of several who have now left the new community college and gone back to their old jobs.
Who will care more about the integrity of the academic discipline: Faculty or administrators? The former are the people who have some direct personal contact with students, and have some likelihood of defending their interests as people. The latter are just PHB's looking to increase the bottom line. Shifting power from the former to the latter is one sign that we're not really serious or respectful towards real learning in this country.
Or you might say it's the last bastion where a strong union keeps a voice for the actual workers and experts at the table. And therefore is top on the chopping block for the capitalist enterprise.
Oh, surprise: Not everyone is familiar with the specific UI of your exotic device.
When I was like 14 I had this interaction with my soccer coach on the bus: He was speaking to the team, and I had headphones on. Him: "Take those off!". Me: "But I'm not playing anything, I can hear you." Him: "I don't care, take them off". At which point it immediately dawned on me that from his perspective, he couldn't actually confirm or check that fact. While I needed to think that through one time, apparently others take a lifetime without grokking that. "Trust but Verify", where the only feasible verification for arbitrary devices is to have them put away silently out of sight.
"Both groups end up winning -- the second because they have cheap and easy access to education, and the first because the reduced demand for classroom seats will drive down prices."
Well, maybe. One possible problem: Is the second group so diminishingly small that there's no business case for the MOOC? Obviously, Thrun and others tried to bull-through MOOCs for the huge mass of students failing at remedial math -- even though there's mountains of pre-existing research that it's an unworkable fit for those skill-crippled students. But he tried it anyway, because in theory if it worked there'd be a gold mine on the other side. Conceivably once it's proven that the prospective customer base is really quite small the bubble will burst and no will bother offering MOOCs anymore.
"After that, if you can't learn largely on your own, especially with online and other material available (and fellow students if you want) you shouldn't be in university."
Now, that's a restatement of the scene in Good Will Hunting where he points out that all the material covered in a college class can be found in the library, effectively for free. Technically true -- true ever since the Gutenberg printing press -- and yet the need and demand for face time with an expert teaching a class has not diminished. So the statement overlooks the support and resources that most people need in practice.
"If employers like this emphasis, it might be a bigger threat to the academic status quo than offering traditional college courses."
Please. Here is a list of technologies that did NOT result in the demise of college education:
- Books mass-produced on the printing press. - Correspondence courses in the early 1900's, engaged by millions of hopeful learners at the time. - Radio or television programming. - Software-based learning from the 1960's onward. - Online courses from the 1990's onward. - MOOC in the 2010's onward.
I really don't understand the Slashdot mass delusion that this or any technology could mean the death of colleges in any short- to medium time frame.
The European Union backed down on Wednesday from threats to suspend agreements granting the United States access to European data, rejecting calls for a tougher stance over alleged U.S. spying.
The move marks an abrupt about-turn for the European Commission, the EU executive, after warnings it issued in July to U.S. officials following revelations that Washington had spied on European citizens and EU institutions.
Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU's commissioner for home affairs, said she had found no proof of U.S. wrongdoing, either in the sharing of flight passenger records or in the tracking of international payments...
Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch Liberal member of the European Parliament, criticized the Commission's move.
"They are putting diplomatic relations ahead of citizens rights. The Commission is being extremely timid to the Americans," she told Reuters.
"They have done an investigation and concluded that everything is hunky dory. This is not serious," she said, adding that taking the United States at its word was naive.
Interesting point, but: Which of these is not like the others (in terms of social/political reaction)?
(a) People used to believe in elements of Earth-air-water-fire, but now we know better. (b) People used to believe in Aether filling all of space, but now we know better. (c) People used to believe in God having created all varieties of life, but now we know better.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost 3,000 results at Amazon for New Windows 7 Desktops at the moment...
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_condition-type_0?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A565098%2Ck%3Awindows+7%2Cp_n_operating_system_browse-bin%3A2287320011%2Cp_n_condition-type%3A2224371011&keywords=windows+7&ie=UTF8&qid=1387734401&rnid=2224369011
isn't the current theme "its the economy, stupid!" ?
That was the catchphrase for the 1992 Clinton Presidential campaign, which was over 20 years ago now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid
"I still believe that if no one dance the sun would not come back after winter. And I believe this not because no one can keep everyone from dancing at the solstice, but because it is pretty to think so. It matters not that reality does not fit the believe"
If you admit that reality does not fit this belief, then you don't really believe it, do you? What you have is a story that you like to tell, which is not the same thing. All you're doing in the post above is playing word games by not honoring the definition of "belief".
"Polls are garbage if you expect a 95%+ confidence interval."
What? Every political poll ever created is reported at exactly the 95% confidence interval.
For example, from the report linked by GGP post: "After taking into account the complex sample design, the average margin of sampling error on the 1,050 completed interviews with Muslims is +/-5 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence." (p. 57)
More generally, when reporting inferences from sample data you can always pick ANY confidence level you wish, and if it increases then the margin of error just gets bigger. Perhaps you meant to use some other phrase or idea in place of "95%+ confidence interval".
For what it's worth, more instruction in reading-as-its-own-thing can be counterproductive. What I've seen for reported research is that time spent on raw reading strategies ("find the main point", etc.) is productive up to about 10 hours and then doesn't give any more benefit. More productive is to get kids reading rich-content material in history and science and everything else, developing larger vocabularies, making more connections between more ideas and concepts. Neuroscientist Daniel Willingham phrases this, "Teaching content is teaching reading." Saying that we need to perfect reading in the abstract before broadening knowledge of the world is a waste of time and counterproductive -- like spinning tires in mud or dropping kids mentally into a sensory-deprivation tank.
http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/03/school-time-knowledge-and-reading-comprehension.html
"Critical thinking" is this mantra that has come to signify almost nothing. A peculiar CS-person fugue seems to be "education is never abstracted enough to satisfy me". People cannot think in the abstract without first thinking about something concrete. Lots of specific knowledge is what allows connections to be made.
"Knowledge comes into play mainly because if we want our students to learn how to think critically, they must have something to think about." [Daniel T. Willingham, American Educator]
My current employer told me, years after the fact, that I got an interview specifically because my cover letter seemed so literate. Quality writing is the level-zero evaluation (quick and accessible) for anyone's level of education and attention to detail.
More specifically, the idea of programming a computer and being simultaneously sloppy on syntax is pretty mind-boggling -- and from experience the code turned out by people like that, not caring about how they communicate with other people (if it compiles, it's committed), is pretty hellish.
"The idea is one is really not too far from zero."
On a percentage basis it's pretty damned* far.
* No pun intended.
My understanding is that's not the case. Satanism at least shares general allegiance to the overall Christian mythology. Atheists' rejection of the whole thing, in its very reasonableness, is far more threatening and terrifying to religious folk. From what I can tell.
'This story makes me think that next week we'll be hearing about massive layoffs, and new openings with the agency."
Your ideas seem to present an arbitrage opportunity. I will bet you $1000 that we will not hear about massive layoffs next week at the NSA.
"The reason the NSA metastasized into what it is now is because that is what the American people wanted. After (and before) the 9/11 attacks they wanted government protection from the big bad world."
There's this thing called "leadership". Yes, the unwashed masses are terrifyingly pliable -- they will go along with most anything the head honchos and media say together. The American people could accept a post 9-11 president saying "we need preventive war, offshore detention centers, and mass surveillance". The American people could also accept a post-Pearl Harbor president saying "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". The various elements of the Bush/Cheney doctrine existed years beforehand, and were only pushed to the fore by interested parties when they saw a time of volatility and weakness. The majority of the responsibility rests with individual leaders who made specific decisions at specific times to stab us in the back.
Also: "irregardless" is not a word.
You need a passport or something equivalent to a passport. Be useful or pedantic.
You need to carry the passport not to get into Canada but to return to the U.S.:
"Beginning in June 2009, all U.S. citizens will have to present a passport or other secure document that denotes identity and citizenship when entering the U.S. from Canada."
"Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt."
I think you give university administrators too much credit. Good or bad, they just want things cheap, and non-tenured positions are cheaper (and also easier to intimidate and get rid of arbitrarily; quite a bit like H1B visas). I had a dean literally laugh in my face once in a job interview when I said I was an excellent teacher with high student evaluations. "We don't care about that, we can get anybody off the street to teach a class," he said.
You should read this article in the current Thought & Action magazine -- http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/TA2013Rosenthal_Schnee.pdf
Summary: For the first time in 40 years, the City University of New York (CUNY) has started up a new community college, dedicated to novel teaching techniques. As part of that, they've refused to hire or grant any tenured faculty at all, not implemented departments or department chairs, not given faculty a vote in committees or any faculty senate structure, etc. The article writer is a long-time professor of math at another CUNY school, who was so excited by the prospect of trying new teaching techniques that he jumped ship anyway, despite concerns from colleagues. End of the story is that administration took away all their initial promises and there was nothing the faculty could do about it (for example: promise of 40% concentration on math studies, and one-on-one contact time between students and faculty, replaced by peer tutoring). This formerly excited professor is one of several who have now left the new community college and gone back to their old jobs.
Who will care more about the integrity of the academic discipline: Faculty or administrators? The former are the people who have some direct personal contact with students, and have some likelihood of defending their interests as people. The latter are just PHB's looking to increase the bottom line. Shifting power from the former to the latter is one sign that we're not really serious or respectful towards real learning in this country.
Or you might say it's the last bastion where a strong union keeps a voice for the actual workers and experts at the table. And therefore is top on the chopping block for the capitalist enterprise.
Academic freedom, as in, freedom of speech, "free to express their opinions without fear from institutional censorship or discipline".
Also: Jar-Jar Binks wasn't a lame, racist character, there's a well funded anti-George Lucas campaign going on.
Oh, surprise: Not everyone is familiar with the specific UI of your exotic device.
When I was like 14 I had this interaction with my soccer coach on the bus: He was speaking to the team, and I had headphones on. Him: "Take those off!". Me: "But I'm not playing anything, I can hear you." Him: "I don't care, take them off". At which point it immediately dawned on me that from his perspective, he couldn't actually confirm or check that fact. While I needed to think that through one time, apparently others take a lifetime without grokking that. "Trust but Verify", where the only feasible verification for arbitrary devices is to have them put away silently out of sight.
"Both groups end up winning -- the second because they have cheap and easy access to education, and the first because the reduced demand for classroom seats will drive down prices."
Well, maybe. One possible problem: Is the second group so diminishingly small that there's no business case for the MOOC? Obviously, Thrun and others tried to bull-through MOOCs for the huge mass of students failing at remedial math -- even though there's mountains of pre-existing research that it's an unworkable fit for those skill-crippled students. But he tried it anyway, because in theory if it worked there'd be a gold mine on the other side. Conceivably once it's proven that the prospective customer base is really quite small the bubble will burst and no will bother offering MOOCs anymore.
"After that, if you can't learn largely on your own, especially with online and other material available (and fellow students if you want) you shouldn't be in university."
Now, that's a restatement of the scene in Good Will Hunting where he points out that all the material covered in a college class can be found in the library, effectively for free. Technically true -- true ever since the Gutenberg printing press -- and yet the need and demand for face time with an expert teaching a class has not diminished. So the statement overlooks the support and resources that most people need in practice.
http://youtu.be/QnZ0Y4rvz6E?t=3m15s
Yes indeed. The only sad thing is that they're not publicly traded so there's no opportunity to short-sell them.
"If employers like this emphasis, it might be a bigger threat to the academic status quo than offering traditional college courses."
Please. Here is a list of technologies that did NOT result in the demise of college education:
- Books mass-produced on the printing press.
- Correspondence courses in the early 1900's, engaged by millions of hopeful learners at the time.
- Radio or television programming.
- Software-based learning from the 1960's onward.
- Online courses from the 1990's onward.
- MOOC in the 2010's onward.
I really don't understand the Slashdot mass delusion that this or any technology could mean the death of colleges in any short- to medium time frame.
That's the more concise headline today at Reuters -- http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/27/us-eu-us-security-idUSBRE9AQ0F120131127
The European Union backed down on Wednesday from threats to suspend agreements granting the United States access to European data, rejecting calls for a tougher stance over alleged U.S. spying.
The move marks an abrupt about-turn for the European Commission, the EU executive, after warnings it issued in July to U.S. officials following revelations that Washington had spied on European citizens and EU institutions.
Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU's commissioner for home affairs, said she had found no proof of U.S. wrongdoing, either in the sharing of flight passenger records or in the tracking of international payments...
Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch Liberal member of the European Parliament, criticized the Commission's move.
"They are putting diplomatic relations ahead of citizens rights. The Commission is being extremely timid to the Americans," she told Reuters.
"They have done an investigation and concluded that everything is hunky dory. This is not serious," she said, adding that taking the United States at its word was naive.
Interesting point, but: Which of these is not like the others (in terms of social/political reaction)?
(a) People used to believe in elements of Earth-air-water-fire, but now we know better.
(b) People used to believe in Aether filling all of space, but now we know better.
(c) People used to believe in God having created all varieties of life, but now we know better.