So look at the map of racist tweets as suggested in the summary. True or false: The hotspots are located particularly close to those states asking for secession.
The two things are not automatically equal, but in this case we have hard data that does suggest a correlation.
Fact: In this election, young people (18-29) cast more votes than old people (65+) for the first time ever; and they vastly prefer Dems positions on social issues (immigration, health care, women's rights, gay marriage, etc.). Demographics say this will only increase in the future -- http://news.yahoo.com/gop-faces-steep-climb-young-voters-080006202--politics.html
That's not everything, not a panacea for all our problems, but saying "the entire country has been moving to the right" just doesn't seem generally valid.
Meanwhile, increasing voter participation occurred for Blacks and Hispanics. Young people (18-29) cast more votes than old people (65+) for possibly the first time ever -- and they vastly prefer Dems positions on social issues (immigration, health care, women's rights, gay marriage, etc.), breaking 60% for Obama even when most pundits thought they were disenchanted. This demographic trend is only expected to increase -- http://news.yahoo.com/gop-faces-steep-climb-young-voters-080006202--politics.html
Arguably, the GOP is between a rock and a hard place; their primary seemingly cannot nominate a person acceptable to the electorate at large. This might even be seen to be the case for the last 20 years if the vote in 2000 had been counted accurately.
"But winning the battle won't win the war. Mr. Obama will be weakened by the divisive campaign; the electorate is bitterly split, and he will find Congress harder to work with. The members of Congress will be acutely aware that 48 or 49% of the popular vote went to his opponent (and he may even lose the popular vote). They will be less willing to go out on a limb to support his policies unless they are from strongly pro-Obama districts, and the average district will be closer to a 49-51 split."
This is pretty much exactly what I said on the eve that Bush was inaugurated back in 2000. However, we got exactly the opposite: a rabid-dog approach to governing, with the executive pushing very radical policies, and doing a full-court press every day on Congress to pass them. And most of the time, it worked wonders.
So I think (as a registered Democrat) this is the one useful lesson we could take from the Bush years: a completely aggressive legislating stance that never gives up can make amazing, fundamental changes. But Obama and the Democrats took exactly the opposite tactic: negotiating, compromising, and triangulating away all their principles. The result has basically been a retrenchment and cementing of Bush policies as "the new normal". Such an enormous shame.
"Okay so you're talking about roughly six and a half billion people. As of the writing of this post, votevotevote.net's page says: 1050 VOTES have been received"
I would have some small concern that, having paid off the extortionist in Lebanon, someone at the FBI might decide it's a good idea to investigate and charge this victim for transferring money to a presumed terrorist. Stranger things have happened. Granted there's no way that the FBI can actually help his business now, so I'm dubious as to where the upside is for that contact with law enforcement.
You sound like someone who doesn't know about Duverger's Law -- the mathematical observation that in a voting system such as ours, two parties will become dominant, and it's not strategically viable for any third party to enter the mix.
Seriously, every time a third-party candidate starts getting votes, it splits that side of the electorate and winds up ushering in the party on the diametrically far side. Our voting system is, unfortunately, fundamentally broken.
"First the full study was far more then 2 children."
What study are you talking about? TFA isn't about any study at all, it's literally just about two pictures. The last line mentions a separate study at Washington U. about hippocampus sizes, which is totally different and not what these illustrations show.
So basically this qualifies as a glorified anecdote. We're taking the researcher's word for age and conditions of these two brain scans. The article chooses to talk solely about mother's love, and not any confounding factors. Where are the correlation statistics for mother, father, age, genetics, economics, poverty, education, community, nutrition, illness, accidents, grandparents, number of siblings, geographic location, social services, etc., etc.?
Offhand I would bet that simple nutrition is more highly correlated with brain size than mother's emotional attention -- and the former is something we can change with social programs. For this kind of stuff I want to see scientific studies, not People magazine exposes.
Current issue of American Educator has an interesting article -- 10-year study in Philadelphia, comparing rich and poor sections of town, in libraries where a multimillion dollar grant allowed them to provide equivalent resources in books and computer learning software. The results seen by those researchers are that the rich kids were guided by their parents in using all of those things, while the poor kids without any assistance or background knowledge failed to use them successfully. End result: poor kids actually fell more behind the rich than when they started out.
"Over the 10 years we spent in these two libraries, the gap in the amount of time adolescents spent reading increased substantially. Regardless of technology (books or computers), reading tends to predominate in Chestnut Hill but not in Lillian Marrero. After years of technology improvements, there is now a larger gap between these two communities in the amount of time spent reading than before. In fact, our rough estimates indicate that 10- to 12-year-olds at Chestnut Hill were reading more than twice as many words as their peers at Lillian Marrero." [p. 23]
These are dedicated researchers studying the issue for 10 years. This is not the head of OLPC pitching questionable and unverifiable extraordinary claims, in the quest for more funding (“If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte said, FTA).
Yes, as soon as the printing press was invented, teachers became fundamentally unnecessary and put on the road to extinction, decreasing in number every year.
The tragedy of America is that its system was designed prior to mathematical understanding of voting principles, and it is inherently unable to deal with party-politics (or "factions" as Washington begged us to avoid in his farewell address). Duverger's Law observes that such a system will certainly become controlled by just two parties. If those two parties are essentially bought out by corporations, and present candidates with effectively identical beliefs on the most important issues, then there is no way for the citizens to alter the direction of the government.
"If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera..."
Why would I agree to a Terms-of-Service in order to not use the service? That's completely contradictory.
I hate to say it, but the first thing that springs to mind is this being emblematic of the generally shoddy, poorly-planned work of these massive online courses.
Disagree. If anything, the main problem with American education is a lack of standardization. Every district is on its own at the mercy of shark-like curriculum salespersons. Students switch schools and waste time: they're lost because they don't have prerequisites for the new program, or they're repeating the same topics over again. Teachers go through education school, not knowing exactly what curriculum they will deal with, learning education purely in the abstract, with no concrete "stuff" that they'll actually be teaching.
The countries that have the top high school education programs these days (e.g., Sweden, Korea, Japan) have standard nationalized curricula, education schools that train teachers in that curricula, more support and mentoring for teachers, and constant feedback and improvements. If only that were even imaginable in America.
Slashdot Mirror
So look at the map of racist tweets as suggested in the summary. True or false: The hotspots are located particularly close to those states asking for secession.
The two things are not automatically equal, but in this case we have hard data that does suggest a correlation.
Fact: In this election, young people (18-29) cast more votes than old people (65+) for the first time ever; and they vastly prefer Dems positions on social issues (immigration, health care, women's rights, gay marriage, etc.). Demographics say this will only increase in the future -- http://news.yahoo.com/gop-faces-steep-climb-young-voters-080006202--politics.html
That's not everything, not a panacea for all our problems, but saying "the entire country has been moving to the right" just doesn't seem generally valid.
I voted for Jill Stein, too.
However, math, game theory, and Duverger's Law all say it's impossible for her to win, so that's largely irrelevant to how our country is governed.
"The Republicans have the hick and religious nutter vote locked up, why court them at all?"
Actually, no. Among the bitch-slaps the GOP took this cycle was the fact that, against all expectations, 6 million fewer white people voted than in 2008 (and of course, their population is actually larger) -- http://news.yahoo.com/karl-rove-why-romney-lost-obama-suppressing-vote-215625694.html
Meanwhile, increasing voter participation occurred for Blacks and Hispanics. Young people (18-29) cast more votes than old people (65+) for possibly the first time ever -- and they vastly prefer Dems positions on social issues (immigration, health care, women's rights, gay marriage, etc.), breaking 60% for Obama even when most pundits thought they were disenchanted. This demographic trend is only expected to increase -- http://news.yahoo.com/gop-faces-steep-climb-young-voters-080006202--politics.html
Arguably, the GOP is between a rock and a hard place; their primary seemingly cannot nominate a person acceptable to the electorate at large. This might even be seen to be the case for the last 20 years if the vote in 2000 had been counted accurately.
Also from Accenture (it's believed) -- http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/election-2012
Hope it doesn't crash on "day zero", but I suppose from an internal profit-margin perspective, why not?
"the clear point wasn't that a large population needs a large sample, but rather a large and diverse population needs a large sample size."
That's wrong, wrong, totally wrong, absolutely wrong, unequivocally wrong.
There are other possible biases, but n=1000 being a small sample size is definitely not one of them.
Because then it's like sports.
"But winning the battle won't win the war. Mr. Obama will be weakened by the divisive campaign; the electorate is bitterly split, and he will find Congress harder to work with. The members of Congress will be acutely aware that 48 or 49% of the popular vote went to his opponent (and he may even lose the popular vote). They will be less willing to go out on a limb to support his policies unless they are from strongly pro-Obama districts, and the average district will be closer to a 49-51 split."
This is pretty much exactly what I said on the eve that Bush was inaugurated back in 2000. However, we got exactly the opposite: a rabid-dog approach to governing, with the executive pushing very radical policies, and doing a full-court press every day on Congress to pass them. And most of the time, it worked wonders.
So I think (as a registered Democrat) this is the one useful lesson we could take from the Bush years: a completely aggressive legislating stance that never gives up can make amazing, fundamental changes. But Obama and the Democrats took exactly the opposite tactic: negotiating, compromising, and triangulating away all their principles. The result has basically been a retrenchment and cementing of Bush policies as "the new normal". Such an enormous shame.
"Okay so you're talking about roughly six and a half billion people. As of the writing of this post, votevotevote.net's page says: 1050 VOTES have been received"
This Is The Dumbest Goddamn Thing You Can Say About Statistics.
I would have some small concern that, having paid off the extortionist in Lebanon, someone at the FBI might decide it's a good idea to investigate and charge this victim for transferring money to a presumed terrorist. Stranger things have happened. Granted there's no way that the FBI can actually help his business now, so I'm dubious as to where the upside is for that contact with law enforcement.
"I promise I'm not schilling."
Then I will assume that I can hit your fastball, and that investing in your game company might be a good idea.
There should also be an explicit enforcement mechanism, the likes of which were pointedly left out of the USA Bill of Rights.
You sound like someone who doesn't know about Duverger's Law -- the mathematical observation that in a voting system such as ours, two parties will become dominant, and it's not strategically viable for any third party to enter the mix.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Seriously, every time a third-party candidate starts getting votes, it splits that side of the electorate and winds up ushering in the party on the diametrically far side. Our voting system is, unfortunately, fundamentally broken.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgTBxHhYno
The point is: Cite scientific data or STFU. This article does no such thing.
"First the full study was far more then 2 children."
What study are you talking about? TFA isn't about any study at all, it's literally just about two pictures. The last line mentions a separate study at Washington U. about hippocampus sizes, which is totally different and not what these illustrations show.
They're more interchangeable with each other than either one is with a human teacher.
So basically this qualifies as a glorified anecdote. We're taking the researcher's word for age and conditions of these two brain scans. The article chooses to talk solely about mother's love, and not any confounding factors. Where are the correlation statistics for mother, father, age, genetics, economics, poverty, education, community, nutrition, illness, accidents, grandparents, number of siblings, geographic location, social services, etc., etc.?
Offhand I would bet that simple nutrition is more highly correlated with brain size than mother's emotional attention -- and the former is something we can change with social programs. For this kind of stuff I want to see scientific studies, not People magazine exposes.
Current issue of American Educator has an interesting article -- 10-year study in Philadelphia, comparing rich and poor sections of town, in libraries where a multimillion dollar grant allowed them to provide equivalent resources in books and computer learning software. The results seen by those researchers are that the rich kids were guided by their parents in using all of those things, while the poor kids without any assistance or background knowledge failed to use them successfully. End result: poor kids actually fell more behind the rich than when they started out.
"Over the 10 years we spent in these two libraries, the gap in the amount of time adolescents spent reading increased substantially. Regardless of technology (books or computers), reading tends to predominate in Chestnut Hill but not in Lillian Marrero. After years of technology improvements, there is now a larger gap between these two communities in the amount of time spent reading than before. In fact, our rough estimates indicate that 10- to 12-year-olds at Chestnut Hill were reading more than twice as many words as their peers at Lillian Marrero." [p. 23]
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall2012/Neuman.pdf
These are dedicated researchers studying the issue for 10 years. This is not the head of OLPC pitching questionable and unverifiable extraordinary claims, in the quest for more funding (“If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte said, FTA).
Yes, as soon as the printing press was invented, teachers became fundamentally unnecessary and put on the road to extinction, decreasing in number every year.
[/sarcasm]
The tragedy of America is that its system was designed prior to mathematical understanding of voting principles, and it is inherently unable to deal with party-politics (or "factions" as Washington begged us to avoid in his farewell address). Duverger's Law observes that such a system will certainly become controlled by just two parties. If those two parties are essentially bought out by corporations, and present candidates with effectively identical beliefs on the most important issues, then there is no way for the citizens to alter the direction of the government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Short story collection.
You seem to have missed the key adjective "awful" in the title/question.
"If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera..."
Why would I agree to a Terms-of-Service in order to not use the service? That's completely contradictory.
I hate to say it, but the first thing that springs to mind is this being emblematic of the generally shoddy, poorly-planned work of these massive online courses.
Disagree. If anything, the main problem with American education is a lack of standardization. Every district is on its own at the mercy of shark-like curriculum salespersons. Students switch schools and waste time: they're lost because they don't have prerequisites for the new program, or they're repeating the same topics over again. Teachers go through education school, not knowing exactly what curriculum they will deal with, learning education purely in the abstract, with no concrete "stuff" that they'll actually be teaching.
The countries that have the top high school education programs these days (e.g., Sweden, Korea, Japan) have standard nationalized curricula, education schools that train teachers in that curricula, more support and mentoring for teachers, and constant feedback and improvements. If only that were even imaginable in America.