It may take several attempts, but it eventually will.
The reason is simple: the powers that be *want* this. Much like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and whatever the current generation mutant strain is, keeps getting brandished about like a giant black rubber donkey dildo. The public says no, but the powers that be want to fuck us. They keep whipping out dildo after dildo, refusing to take the hint that we *DON'T WANT ANY* dildos, not just that specific one.
When they finally manage to snooker us into taking it (all the way I might add, without any lube), then they tell all their friends about it, and from then on, that type of dildoing becomes standard practice, for everyone, everywhere.
What we need is to propose counter legislation FORBIDDING proposals of this type. Simply defeating every proposed terror dick they whip out of their rape kit won't work.
The ones that play ball are the ones with the most known about them. If you have a bought stooge, you want to make sure they stay bought. Never run the risk of having loose lips sinking your ships. Always have a sword of damoclese hanging over their heads to keep them in line with your goals.
Anyone who can't see how the military industrial complex and its intelligence arms are controlling US politics along side other corporate interests needs to have their brains examined. Follow the money. The big expenditures are far and wide military spending, and subsidies. There is no question who is pulling the strings.
The point here, though, is that the stooge only thinks they can get away. The truth is that when they became a stooge, their puppet masters looked in on all their dirty laundry right up front, before accepting them for the job. If she turned on her puppeteers, rest assured, the amount of dirty laundry that would suddenly "leak" mysteriously would be enormous, and damning. She would never work in politics again.
I agree. I hate the trend that UIs have taken lately, where they think the user needs to be constanty entertained at the expense of real functionality.
I don't care too much about how the window gets painted, as long as the information is clearly presented, the interface is easy to use, and the inner workings are lean and fast.
That XFCE has a lot of cross compatibility with applications needing gnome or kde runtimes is a good bonus, but I prefer xfce native versions if available.
The computer is there to help the user do what the user wants to do with the computer. Not to obfuscate tools and functions from the user to shape user behavior. (Looking at *YOU* apple and microsoft!) XFCE's low resource, minimalist overhead, minimalist aesthetic approach to handling things makes me happy for the most part, though I will have to give openbox a try.
I recently experienced this at a speedys in st joseph mo.
As if the idea of charging me a for profit rate for the petrol wasn't enough, they lambasted me with adverts for fox news... on a full color oled display built into the pump that double dutys as the credit terminal.
Speedys is a Sinclair affiliate.
The local quickshops in my area (just a 4.5 hour drive away, in another state..) have taken to blasting me with audio only adverts, but at least those make sense, as they are for items found inside the gas station like coffee, doughnuts, and candybars.
The video ads for TV shows is just... wrf, and over the top meta.
Its an advert, for a show, supported in part by adverts, on a medium that the show doesn't get shown on, in a setting where you would never see that show... ever!...
It did make mw wonder though.
The credit terminal was displaying what looked to be at least 400px wide, full motion digital video with sound. Are these adverts cached locally inside the pump, or do they get streamed on the fly from a hosting service?
If the former, it would be amusing as hell to hack the pumps to display silly fake PSAs, and other LULz.
If the latter, wouldn't that cause the pump operators to have an outstandingly large data throughput with their ISP?
I really hope its the former, and somebody manages to create remote exploits for it with a man in the middle attack, so that "unapproved content" can be pushed to the devices when they update. (Imagine how powerful these would be to spread hacker propoganda.)
And if its the latter, it would be interested in knowing how they manage to get a profit, given the extortionate datarates most businesses face.
No, there's no way those lessons could be comprehensive.
This is the university approach. Chemistry is a huge, expansive subject. Organic chemistry has at least 4 specialist disciplines inside it alone. (Petrology, polymer chemistry, proteomics, agrarian chemistry.. etc.)
Each one is a lifetime's work to become fully versed in.
I propose in 4 weeks to take him from "chemicals are cool!" To "I want to be a pyrochemist!". You can only do that after filling in some blanks, so the kid knows how to sate his own unique interests.
This is a very general overview of the very basics of modern chemistry, and is intended to wet his appetite. It also introduces the non-scientist teacher to what chemistry is all about, and some more meaty details to cover in-depth with little timmy later.
I said it was a basic curriculum to get them started. Not a university degree in organic chemistry in 4 weeks.
What I was pointing out above is that reading skill is not that important with a skilled teacher. I feel that unless timmy was a total veg shouting "TIMMAY!" Nonstop, I could accomplish the stated task, and in the stated time.
Ahh, but you see, ancient textile chemistry is one of my more obscure interests!
Cellulose is chemically inert. Withstands strong acids, and strong alkali solutions remarkably well. That's why they use it for labcoats.
As a consequence of that resilience, it is abysmally hard to get colorants to stick to it.
The ancient egyptians, playing with salts and glasses in their rituals and religious practices, discovered that linen soaked in certain salts held colors better. Through extensive experimentation, the process of mordanting fabrics prior to dying became a major industry, because the cloth they produced held deeper colors, resisted fading and washout far longer, and in some cases, even resisted rotting better.
This knowledge spread through the ancient world, and in about 1000 years or so, was all over africa, the middle east, and mediteranean europe.
As a result of continued experimentation with mordants, as both pretreatments of fabrics, and as additives to the colorant baths themselves, several very sophisticated processes came into existence.
These processes needed to be tightly controlled for optimal quality, and were often guild secrets or highly protected tribal knowledge.
Take for instance, how to use indigo dye.
The blue form of the dye is totally insoluble in water, and only weakly soluble in water. To dye fabric with it, you have to literally break a bond in the complex with a transient third party, so that it can go into solution, and bind to mordanted fabric.
This is accomplished by mixing the blue colorant in a mix of amonium salts and amonia. Traditionally, stale urine. This causes the blue color to completely vanish, and for the solution to take on a cloudy white color. This is called "indigo white." Fabric to be dyed is immersed in this solution, the lid is placed on top of the pot, and it is vigorously boiled to bind the amonia-bound indigotin to the mordanted cellulose.
When the cloth is removed, it appears as if nothing has happened at all!
However, on exposure to the air, oxidation occurs as the ammonia gasses off, and the fabric slowly turns from bleached white linen, to deep ultra blue linen.
Other fantastical dye formulations are for lichen based greens and purples from scottish highlanders, which ONLY work with special mordants, and black dyes made with tannins.
Wrong. Almost everyone did. Not as structured, and with a lot of hoodoo cruft, but if they knew how to mordant linen fibers, they were doing some crazy organic chemistry, and required a pretty good foundation in lab processes and handling.
They might have harbored stupid notions of spontaneous genesis, and "miracles", but that doesn't make what they were doing any less chemistry.
This is the reason for dark age history of chemistry in week 1.
My brother is extremely dyslexic. Has problems writing his own name. He is quite capable of comprehending complex chemical processes, and has helped me in some personal hobby chemistry more than once, and found it very rewarding.
If the student has an impairment, then the teacher/mentor needs to help that student a little more. That's all it means. It was my understanding from the submitter that the child is not mentally handicapped, merely behind the curve. This is easily correctable with some added effort.
If remedial mathematics and reading comprehension are required, administer accordingly. Don't abandon the student because they fail to meet your expectations.
My brother is by no means a dullard. Can't read or write to save his life, but the core concepts of chemistry are his, and I know that for a fact. Literacy is a gateway to knowledge, most assuredly. It, however, is not the exclusive gateway to knowledge. If you treat it like it is, you aren't a good teacher.
While there is a strong (oh yes, so very strong) correllation between homeschooling and religious jesus brainwashing camps passing as education, this is not always the case.
In this case, the submitter want to know if there is a way to teach chemistry without putting the kid into an environment that they found to be an epic waste of time.
Here's a winner:
Learn chemistry *with* the child.
The internet is for so much more than seeing angelina joelee's boobs.
As a chemistry fettishist myself, here's a basic curriculum to help you get started:
Week 1: History of modern chemistry, dark ages to late 1920s. Origins of atomic theory, (avagadro, ideal gas laws, etc.) The periodic table of elements, and its history and properties. (Molar quantities, valence energy levels, history of radium and the discovery of radioactivity, island of stability, etc.) Lab safety. Proper disposal techniques. Identification of standard lab hardware, and their uses, handling, cleaning, and storage.
Week 2: Introduction to stoichiometric chemistry. Lewis acids and lewis bases, (and history of such classifications) Types of bond, degree of strength of bond energy, electronegativity,orbitals and their structures and properties. Indicators. pH testing, how it works, and why it is important. Basic lab processes for mixing acids and bases. Titration lab Definition of "salt". Lab on determining molarity. Pyrolisis
Week 3: Basic introduction to carbon. Indroduction to common organic molecules and functional groups. (Ether, saccharides, alcohols, alkanes, etc.)
Week 4: Synthesis of a complex organic compound. (Something like nylon maybe.) Introduction to catalysts. Introduction to enzymes. Introduction to proteins. Introduction to organic polymers.
After week 4, the kid will either have lost interest, or will be sufficently hooked to ingest chemistry directly from the internet, with some mentoring and tutoring. It is also a higher level of education touchstones than most adults get into. If you set strong academic goals and tests for your student, they will flat hammer a traditionally schooled student of pre-college chemistry on every state exam.
Don't withold imformation or cool knowledge "because they are a kid." You want the kid to hunger for more, not wean them off science. Gorge him with it instead.
The 1000 to 2000 figure was given for dense population centers where prices of goods are artificially inflated by distribution costs. The luxury goods they buy will be more expensive than somebody in a less dense area. This is a failure of the approach, I openly admit, since it implies a dense urban environment.
A better metric for disposable income would be price check many common luxury goods in the local market, and allot a disposable income that would allow purchase of the most common ones, and still leave a surplus.
This value will be different for each locality. This was the intention with the values listed. When you consider incidental luxury costs of an additional car payment, etc, 1000 a month in disposable income can get gobbled quickly. This money is intended to allow people to save for retirement, to have emergency money in case of disasters, pay for schooling for dependent children, and to improve their quality of living, such as continuing their adult education outside the vocational niche you have hired them for.
You expect to profit from the business relationship. They should as well.
I would evaluate the value of my company's product or service in the market at large. This is the starting point. How much is that service actually worth, as determined by the market. Don't cook this number because you think you are awesome. Use the domestic figure.
Now, subtract 10% from that value. Always make your projections conservative, because "shit fucking happens." Better to constantly report a windfall, than to appear to suffer economic adversity.
Itemize the costs to provide that service. This includes the costs your employees have in order to reach your requirements for hire. (Education costs, etc.) Completely ignore what industry pay rates are at this point. We are determining equity, not the status quo.
State a corporate growth goal. How much profit do you need to make to reach that goal? Write this number down. This number should be sensible, not some absurd value like 100%. 5 to 10% is "high". Be conservative. Aim to break this goal with voracious abandon if possible, but don't set impossible goals.
Using the numbers you now have, honestly evaluate how many people you will need to reach the necessary output required to meet your growth target, and of what types and disciplines. Employees of different disciplines have different intrinsic costs for them to be hirable. Adjust their basic equity pay accordingly. You should give each employee around 1000 to 2000 dollars a month free spending money in your projection. Include food and fuel costs, education costs, and the costs of 2.5 children and a spouse. A lawyer needs to be paid more, because they spend more time in the university than an accountant. After the bills are added up, they should be treated the same in terms of their disposable income.
(The hard part) set your pay scale to the same value system.
*NOW* compare your equitable rates against industry standard rates.
Prioritize the actual value in your company each type of employee actually has. How many janitors does it really take to keep the premesis clean? Etc. Where there is a disproportionately high industry standard wage compared to actual employment costs, seek to eliminate positions in the labor pool so that reaching industry pay rate parity does not extensively increase your projected labor budget. This means cutting management positions. Strictly evaluate just how many meetings people really need to attend, how many bosses production staff actually require to work efficiently, and then use this as gospel. Allow the 10% cut on projected value of service make up the slack that can't be ironed out. (But always check your numbers!)
In cases where your projected equitable pay greatly exceeds industry standard pay, leave it high. Dont shaft your employees.
Take all this nice information you collected and digested, and turn it into a nice, bright little flier. When people drop an application, give them a copy of it, and discuss its contents, and why you adhere to it like gospel. Let them know that every 10 years, you hold an audit of the payscale, and adjust it honestly and with integrity. If the position they are applying for will get paid way more than industry standard, make sure they understand exactly why you are paying them more. If the position they are applying for is clearly overpaid in terms of standard compensation by this metric, let them know exactly why you are exceptionally picky about who you will hire, and that the limits on management salaries are fixed. Openly share your own salary to drive the point home. No exceptions. If they don't want the job, don't hire them.
The CEO's and board's pay are given additional constraints, such that their rate of statistical overpayment shall never exceed 100% of the standard takehome value. If this means legal gets paid more, too fucking bad.
This information would be available publicly, along with the quarterly finance reports. This includes the conclusions about statistical over and underpayments against industry
Business is a cuthroat enterprise. As such, there is a clear, and present advantage to shafting employees and keeping them ignorant with information control. If you can pay your people peanuts and get away with it, why on earth would you ever want them to know that they are getting shafted? Profit man! Profit! Its why you started the business!
The difference is that I am not a bloodthirsty, elitist bastard MFer that wants a free lunch, and more shockingly, I don't feel I am entitled to one, and feel I should be paid according to a fair and equitable standard.
This is because I am a fair and equitable person.
As pointed out in the grandparent, the real reason for these information control polices is exactly antithetical to that viewpoint. Claiming it results in a more harmonious workplace when people don't know about the bullshit is a no brainer. Nobody wants to put up with bullshit.
The problem is that the bullshit is so endemic, that its business as usual, and people are perfecty happy to cause the bullshit, as long as they are the beneficiary. That's basically your argument.
Mine is that the bullshit shouldn't be tolerated period, because it causes so many headaches.
That would be the [favoritism] poison, would it not?
Sally gets paid more than Alice, because?
Why wouldn't Alice be miffed about that?
Solution that doesn't open the door to nasty nepotism and favoritism?
Hard set pay grades, openly state where the figures come from, let people walk if they demand more pay.
Not everyone is a throat slitting MFer. As an employer who wants quality employees, employees that want to bleed me dry because they feel special, but really aren't, are not a commodity I want to keep anyway. (I am not actually an employer, but that's how I view the situation.)
Let's say for a moment that your boss is a letcherous toad.
As a typical slashdotter, I make the following presumptions:
You are male Aged 25 to 35 Somewhat akward Possibly a little heavy Actually proficient at your IT job
Now, let's say some pretty 20something scrumpet with the IQ of a raddish, but with totally knockout boobs, great hair, perfect teeth, and good taste in perfume walks in the door fresh out of college, looking for a database programming job. You get assigned to test her proficiency. She bombs. Horribly. Doesn't even know what a tuple is.
She gets hired anyway.
You bite your lip, and do your job. She fucks shit up way more than she helps, is snarky, makes fun of your hair, is a total cunt, but lays on the coochie mama act around your boss, and he eats it like fudge.
Wouldn't you want to know how much more than you her parasitical leech ass makes?
Favoritism Nepotisim Sexism Racisim Religious persecution Etc.
Employers don't want you to discuss with your co-workers what your pay and benefits packages are, because they offer sweet deals to people they like, and that favoritism is not always above board.
If other employees knew that billybob the janitor was getting paid three times what they were, they would demand to know why, ad worse, demand better pay. Usually billybob gets that sweet reimbursement for his labor because of some dirty secret, like he's the boss's lover, brother, illegitimate son, whatever. All of which are clearly outright illegal.
Keeping people ignorant let's you get away with abuses of power. That's why they penalise people who share their information.
Simply because I am an engineer doesn't mean I don't value culture or heritage, or aesthetics in design. I bought an airbrush for personal use not that long ago, for doing artwork.
The point was about specialization, and the trend LA moves toward, which seems more geared toward hero worship of dead playwrights and literary trivia on the english lit side, and form over function, with excessive abstractionism in the graphic arts side. Art is an expression of the artist, and if you can't express yourself, you won't ever be a good one. Schools of art are useful only in teaching you how to better articulate yourself to produce that art.
However, when the architect focuses on "the aesthetic VISION!" Of his building design, completely neglecting the functional aspects, and ends up producing a leaky kontiki of an apartment building, I can't help but feel he is a bad architect. I've seen more than my fair share of "architectural wonders" that the only thing I wonder about is how they are still standing, and why the roof hasn't caved in from snow landing on top.
The best work is when function melds seamlessly with form, and the glorious looking building is equally beautifully engineered to service a need. Gargoyles on buildings serve a utilitarian purpose, and are not just idle decoration, for instance. They serve as downspouts and drains, just covered up creatively with grotesquely cute little statues of imps.
And that's just architecture.
What I am harping at here is that your "grand vision" doesn't mean shit if it has no meaning to your audience. If your audience has no more clue about your narrative structure than you do about the properties of an ether bond in a saccharide, don't expect them to understand what you are talking about.
Now. Imagine this little gem of a situation:
You want to write a story, but are told that you can only do so if already licensed to a publisher, and paying for a special room to write your story in, and that you have to obey an epic shitton of china-like regulations for narrative content, with oversight.
That's what people's obscene fears about science and engineering force hobby scientists and engineers to put up with. People are afraid of "the chemicals", or about "explosions", and "don't feel safe!" Because they don't know enough about the work those people are trying to do to know how totally benign and harmless it is. So, to make themselves feel safe, they institute all kinds of political red tape to make the bad scientists and scary engineers go away.
The LA world is not immune from this either. People worried about the use of the word "nigger" in mark twain's works for instance, or other such literary censorship, because it makes people "feel unsafe!".
The message I was conveying is that there is too much specialization, and not enough generalization. There is a decided lack of common ground for people to get to gether and realize that thir neighbor is just like they are, but with different interests.
People need to generalize, so that people can socialize effectively, communicate effectively, and work together effectively.
Without that, you end up with what we have now, with people so batshit scared of everyone else that we have people calling national security hotlines over every piddly assed thing, people convinced their neighbors are pedophiles out to rape their toddler, and people afraid to go next door and just talk!
People who can spout shakespeare and who compose haiku on the spot about dandilions in the breeze, but get scared and apprehensive when somebody mentions dihydrogen monoxide being dumped into rivers and lakes.
What is needed is not more LA, or specialist training. What is needed is a braoder general education to help ensure that specializing adults can still effectively communicate with each other in society, and to keep irrational fears about "scary science!" And "scary engineering!" To a minimum.
Part of the problem there is the "everyone has a RIGHT to feel SAFE!" Mantra from the liberal arts heavy side of things.
(Bear with me here...)
In today's highly specialist society and economy, we constantly run into the situation where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and vise versa. The english major may not have the slightest idea what happens when you drop copper nuggets into concentrated nitric acid, for instance. Likewise, a chemistry major may not be terribly beholden to the works of shakespear enough to know which play the scene with the 3 witches is from.
The problem comes in, where well meaning but unsavvy people want to increase their perception of security. Knowledge is power, and power gives security. As people specialize, they sacrifice general knowledge for specialist knowledge. This means that as a consequence, the less general knowledge they have, the less emotionally and intellectually defended they are from general activities outside their speciality. This is why people have unreasonable fears about "chemicals", and "germs." They don't have the general knowledge to know that everything is a chemical, and that most germs are harmless, if not beneficial to them. Instead they get taken in by overpriced organic foods, and spend tons of money on hand sanitizer, and end up with kids suffering from allergies and asthma from being too clean.
A similr thing happens with people who would want to be cutting edge scientists and engineers.
They run into all manner of organized resistance from people outside those specialities if they attempt to hone their skills outside of a well entrenched and expensive to operate environment, because the idea of somebody inventing a new plastic in their basement is scary to people who don't know that polymer chemistry is pretty damned harmless, and that the cleaners under the sink are usually more toxic.
Engineers run afoul of people who get scared by shiny, unknown cylendrical objects with wires coming out. It doesn't even have to be that ominous looking; just cutting and fabricating metal parts and gears can make non-engineer types squeemish.
The chilling effect is that enginners, chemists, and general scientists have no choice but to operate in expensive/restricting university or corporate settings, and that greatly diminishes the desire of people who would otherwise make great contributions to those fields.
If you want people to be engineers and scientists, you have to *LET* those people be engineers and scientists. Placating to other people's irrational fears about "bombs", and "chemicals" does unspeakable harm to those vocations. For added fun, mention "radiation" as well. (Be sure to emphasise that you mean photonic emissions. Enjoy the hysterionics.)
To correct the problem, we need to enforce a suitable level of general scientific and engineering literacy in our country, so that people know that dihydrogen monixide is perfectly safe to drink, and to handle in large quantities.
This means sacrificing some of the time currently spent on specialist training vocations. Force that shakesperian actor to at least know what a group 7 element is, and about simple mechanical advantage before he gets his english degree. Force the MBA students to have a reasonable amount of general science and engineering in their academic diet of economic fluff pastry before they graduate.
Really, its the only way. General knowledge has to improve, so that people stop having irrational fears about "terrorists" and "mad scientists" as neighbors, or the situation will only get worse.
Would never work. Potato tubers can be cultivated vegitatively.
Buy a common idaho sput from the store. Let it start to sprout from its eyes. Slice the potato so that each slice has an eye on it. Plant the slices.
OMG! Cloned potatoes! (Sarcasm)
Because of this monsanto would never do it. Unless the potatoes also "featured" a state of being totally eyeless, and therefor totally useless as a perineal, they couldn't control supply and jack up the prices like they do with GE cereals and corn.
Slashdot Mirror
A dildo by any other name is still used to fuck you.
no, but it will.
It may take several attempts, but it eventually will.
The reason is simple: the powers that be *want* this. Much like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and whatever the current generation mutant strain is, keeps getting brandished about like a giant black rubber donkey dildo. The public says no, but the powers that be want to fuck us. They keep whipping out dildo after dildo, refusing to take the hint that we *DON'T WANT ANY* dildos, not just that specific one.
When they finally manage to snooker us into taking it (all the way I might add, without any lube), then they tell all their friends about it, and from then on, that type of dildoing becomes standard practice, for everyone, everywhere.
What we need is to propose counter legislation FORBIDDING proposals of this type. Simply defeating every proposed terror dick they whip out of their rape kit won't work.
Unlimited xfer (at throttled speed, mut meh) for 50/mo.
Unlimited xfer (at 4g speed) for 90/mo.
The only carrier in the us that rewards you for owning the damned handset.
That's naive.
The ones that play ball are the ones with the most known about them. If you have a bought stooge, you want to make sure they stay bought. Never run the risk of having loose lips sinking your ships. Always have a sword of damoclese hanging over their heads to keep them in line with your goals.
Anyone who can't see how the military industrial complex and its intelligence arms are controlling US politics along side other corporate interests needs to have their brains examined. Follow the money. The big expenditures are far and wide military spending, and subsidies. There is no question who is pulling the strings.
The point here, though, is that the stooge only thinks they can get away. The truth is that when they became a stooge, their puppet masters looked in on all their dirty laundry right up front, before accepting them for the job. If she turned on her puppeteers, rest assured, the amount of dirty laundry that would suddenly "leak" mysteriously would be enormous, and damning. She would never work in politics again.
I agree. I hate the trend that UIs have taken lately, where they think the user needs to be constanty entertained at the expense of real functionality.
I don't care too much about how the window gets painted, as long as the information is clearly presented, the interface is easy to use, and the inner workings are lean and fast.
That XFCE has a lot of cross compatibility with applications needing gnome or kde runtimes is a good bonus, but I prefer xfce native versions if available.
The computer is there to help the user do what the user wants to do with the computer. Not to obfuscate tools and functions from the user to shape user behavior. (Looking at *YOU* apple and microsoft!) XFCE's low resource, minimalist overhead, minimalist aesthetic approach to handling things makes me happy for the most part, though I will have to give openbox a try.
I recently experienced this at a speedys in st joseph mo.
As if the idea of charging me a for profit rate for the petrol wasn't enough, they lambasted me with adverts for fox news... on a full color oled display built into the pump that double dutys as the credit terminal.
Speedys is a Sinclair affiliate.
The local quickshops in my area (just a 4.5 hour drive away, in another state..) have taken to blasting me with audio only adverts, but at least those make sense, as they are for items found inside the gas station like coffee, doughnuts, and candybars.
The video ads for TV shows is just... wrf, and over the top meta.
Its an advert, for a show, supported in part by adverts, on a medium that the show doesn't get shown on, in a setting where you would never see that show... ever!...
It did make mw wonder though.
The credit terminal was displaying what looked to be at least 400px wide, full motion digital video with sound. Are these adverts cached locally inside the pump, or do they get streamed on the fly from a hosting service?
If the former, it would be amusing as hell to hack the pumps to display silly fake PSAs, and other LULz.
If the latter, wouldn't that cause the pump operators to have an outstandingly large data throughput with their ISP?
I really hope its the former, and somebody manages to create remote exploits for it with a man in the middle attack, so that "unapproved content" can be pushed to the devices when they update. (Imagine how powerful these would be to spread hacker propoganda.)
And if its the latter, it would be interested in knowing how they manage to get a profit, given the extortionate datarates most businesses face.
No, there's no way those lessons could be comprehensive.
This is the university approach. Chemistry is a huge, expansive subject. Organic chemistry has at least 4 specialist disciplines inside it alone. (Petrology, polymer chemistry, proteomics, agrarian chemistry.. etc.)
Each one is a lifetime's work to become fully versed in.
I propose in 4 weeks to take him from "chemicals are cool!" To "I want to be a pyrochemist!". You can only do that after filling in some blanks, so the kid knows how to sate his own unique interests.
This is a very general overview of the very basics of modern chemistry, and is intended to wet his appetite. It also introduces the non-scientist teacher to what chemistry is all about, and some more meaty details to cover in-depth with little timmy later.
I said it was a basic curriculum to get them started. Not a university degree in organic chemistry in 4 weeks.
What I was pointing out above is that reading skill is not that important with a skilled teacher. I feel that unless timmy was a total veg shouting "TIMMAY!" Nonstop, I could accomplish the stated task, and in the stated time.
Less "meth cook's formulary" and "anarchist's cookbook", and more "pub med".
Don't be a sophist.
Ahh, but you see, ancient textile chemistry is one of my more obscure interests!
Cellulose is chemically inert. Withstands strong acids, and strong alkali solutions remarkably well. That's why they use it for labcoats.
As a consequence of that resilience, it is abysmally hard to get colorants to stick to it.
The ancient egyptians, playing with salts and glasses in their rituals and religious practices, discovered that linen soaked in certain salts held colors better. Through extensive experimentation, the process of mordanting fabrics prior to dying became a major industry, because the cloth they produced held deeper colors, resisted fading and washout far longer, and in some cases, even resisted rotting better.
This knowledge spread through the ancient world, and in about 1000 years or so, was all over africa, the middle east, and mediteranean europe.
As a result of continued experimentation with mordants, as both pretreatments of fabrics, and as additives to the colorant baths themselves, several very sophisticated processes came into existence.
These processes needed to be tightly controlled for optimal quality, and were often guild secrets or highly protected tribal knowledge.
Take for instance, how to use indigo dye.
The blue form of the dye is totally insoluble in water, and only weakly soluble in water. To dye fabric with it, you have to literally break a bond in the complex with a transient third party, so that it can go into solution, and bind to mordanted fabric.
This is accomplished by mixing the blue colorant in a mix of amonium salts and amonia. Traditionally, stale urine. This causes the blue color to completely vanish, and for the solution to take on a cloudy white color. This is called "indigo white." Fabric to be dyed is immersed in this solution, the lid is placed on top of the pot, and it is vigorously boiled to bind the amonia-bound indigotin to the mordanted cellulose.
When the cloth is removed, it appears as if nothing has happened at all!
However, on exposure to the air, oxidation occurs as the ammonia gasses off, and the fabric slowly turns from bleached white linen, to deep ultra blue linen.
Other fantastical dye formulations are for lichen based greens and purples from scottish highlanders, which ONLY work with special mordants, and black dyes made with tannins.
Dyers used unholy crazy amounts of chemistry.
Wrong. Almost everyone did. Not as structured, and with a lot of hoodoo cruft, but if they knew how to mordant linen fibers, they were doing some crazy organic chemistry, and required a pretty good foundation in lab processes and handling.
They might have harbored stupid notions of spontaneous genesis, and "miracles", but that doesn't make what they were doing any less chemistry.
This is the reason for dark age history of chemistry in week 1.
As were dyers, weavers, and spinners.
You would be totally floored by the complex chemistry that happens in trying to get organic dyes to stick to cellulose.
I haven't forgotten anything.
Here, let me help you.
My brother is extremely dyslexic. Has problems writing his own name. He is quite capable of comprehending complex chemical processes, and has helped me in some personal hobby chemistry more than once, and found it very rewarding.
If the student has an impairment, then the teacher/mentor needs to help that student a little more. That's all it means. It was my understanding from the submitter that the child is not mentally handicapped, merely behind the curve. This is easily correctable with some added effort.
If remedial mathematics and reading comprehension are required, administer accordingly. Don't abandon the student because they fail to meet your expectations.
My brother is by no means a dullard. Can't read or write to save his life, but the core concepts of chemistry are his, and I know that for a fact. Literacy is a gateway to knowledge, most assuredly. It, however, is not the exclusive gateway to knowledge. If you treat it like it is, you aren't a good teacher.
In the dark ages, people married at 14.
A 10 year old is surprisingly suitable for a very stunning amount of complex information. Humans are far better at learning than you seem to believe.
Correllation is not indicitive of causation.
While there is a strong (oh yes, so very strong) correllation between homeschooling and religious jesus brainwashing camps passing as education, this is not always the case.
In this case, the submitter want to know if there is a way to teach chemistry without putting the kid into an environment that they found to be an epic waste of time.
Here's a winner:
Learn chemistry *with* the child.
The internet is for so much more than seeing angelina joelee's boobs.
As a chemistry fettishist myself, here's a basic curriculum to help you get started:
Week 1:
History of modern chemistry, dark ages to late 1920s.
Origins of atomic theory, (avagadro, ideal gas laws, etc.)
The periodic table of elements, and its history and properties. (Molar quantities, valence energy levels, history of radium and the discovery of radioactivity, island of stability, etc.)
Lab safety.
Proper disposal techniques.
Identification of standard lab hardware, and their uses, handling, cleaning, and storage.
Week 2:
Introduction to stoichiometric chemistry.
Lewis acids and lewis bases, (and history of such classifications)
Types of bond, degree of strength of bond energy, electronegativity,orbitals and their structures and properties.
Indicators.
pH testing, how it works, and why it is important.
Basic lab processes for mixing acids and bases.
Titration lab
Definition of "salt".
Lab on determining molarity.
Pyrolisis
Week 3:
Basic introduction to carbon.
Indroduction to common organic molecules and functional groups. (Ether, saccharides, alcohols, alkanes, etc.)
Week 4:
Synthesis of a complex organic compound. (Something like nylon maybe.)
Introduction to catalysts.
Introduction to enzymes.
Introduction to proteins.
Introduction to organic polymers.
After week 4, the kid will either have lost interest, or will be sufficently hooked to ingest chemistry directly from the internet, with some mentoring and tutoring. It is also a higher level of education touchstones than most adults get into. If you set strong academic goals and tests for your student, they will flat hammer a traditionally schooled student of pre-college chemistry on every state exam.
Don't withold imformation or cool knowledge "because they are a kid." You want the kid to hunger for more, not wean them off science. Gorge him with it instead.
If you note, the proposal meets or exceeds the free market values.
It never undercuts.
It relies heavily on free market forces to work. Collusion on labor costs in the market (as per planned economies) would completely cripple it.
I agree. Wage data must be availabl, for free, and publicly. The proposal depends upon that being the case.
The 1000 to 2000 figure was given for dense population centers where prices of goods are artificially inflated by distribution costs. The luxury goods they buy will be more expensive than somebody in a less dense area. This is a failure of the approach, I openly admit, since it implies a dense urban environment.
A better metric for disposable income would be price check many common luxury goods in the local market, and allot a disposable income that would allow purchase of the most common ones, and still leave a surplus.
This value will be different for each locality. This was the intention with the values listed. When you consider incidental luxury costs of an additional car payment, etc, 1000 a month in disposable income can get gobbled quickly. This money is intended to allow people to save for retirement, to have emergency money in case of disasters, pay for schooling for dependent children, and to improve their quality of living, such as continuing their adult education outside the vocational niche you have hired them for.
You expect to profit from the business relationship. They should as well.
Quite right.
Here's how I would try though:
I would evaluate the value of my company's product or service in the market at large. This is the starting point. How much is that service actually worth, as determined by the market. Don't cook this number because you think you are awesome. Use the domestic figure.
Now, subtract 10% from that value. Always make your projections conservative, because "shit fucking happens." Better to constantly report a windfall, than to appear to suffer economic adversity.
Itemize the costs to provide that service. This includes the costs your employees have in order to reach your requirements for hire. (Education costs, etc.) Completely ignore what industry pay rates are at this point. We are determining equity, not the status quo.
State a corporate growth goal. How much profit do you need to make to reach that goal? Write this number down. This number should be sensible, not some absurd value like 100%. 5 to 10% is "high". Be conservative. Aim to break this goal with voracious abandon if possible, but don't set impossible goals.
Using the numbers you now have, honestly evaluate how many people you will need to reach the necessary output required to meet your growth target, and of what types and disciplines. Employees of different disciplines have different intrinsic costs for them to be hirable. Adjust their basic equity pay accordingly. You should give each employee around 1000 to 2000 dollars a month free spending money in your projection. Include food and fuel costs, education costs, and the costs of 2.5 children and a spouse. A lawyer needs to be paid more, because they spend more time in the university than an accountant. After the bills are added up, they should be treated the same in terms of their disposable income.
(The hard part) set your pay scale to the same value system.
*NOW* compare your equitable rates against industry standard rates.
Prioritize the actual value in your company each type of employee actually has. How many janitors does it really take to keep the premesis clean? Etc. Where there is a disproportionately high industry standard wage compared to actual employment costs, seek to eliminate positions in the labor pool so that reaching industry pay rate parity does not extensively increase your projected labor budget. This means cutting management positions. Strictly evaluate just how many meetings people really need to attend, how many bosses production staff actually require to work efficiently, and then use this as gospel. Allow the 10% cut on projected value of service make up the slack that can't be ironed out. (But always check your numbers!)
In cases where your projected equitable pay greatly exceeds industry standard pay, leave it high. Dont shaft your employees.
Take all this nice information you collected and digested, and turn it into a nice, bright little flier. When people drop an application, give them a copy of it, and discuss its contents, and why you adhere to it like gospel. Let them know that every 10 years, you hold an audit of the payscale, and adjust it honestly and with integrity. If the position they are applying for will get paid way more than industry standard, make sure they understand exactly why you are paying them more. If the position they are applying for is clearly overpaid in terms of standard compensation by this metric, let them know exactly why you are exceptionally picky about who you will hire, and that the limits on management salaries are fixed. Openly share your own salary to drive the point home. No exceptions. If they don't want the job, don't hire them.
The CEO's and board's pay are given additional constraints, such that their rate of statistical overpayment shall never exceed 100% of the standard takehome value. If this means legal gets paid more, too fucking bad.
This information would be available publicly, along with the quarterly finance reports. This includes the conclusions about statistical over and underpayments against industry
Probably.
Business is a cuthroat enterprise. As such, there is a clear, and present advantage to shafting employees and keeping them ignorant with information control. If you can pay your people peanuts and get away with it, why on earth would you ever want them to know that they are getting shafted? Profit man! Profit! Its why you started the business!
The difference is that I am not a bloodthirsty, elitist bastard MFer that wants a free lunch, and more shockingly, I don't feel I am entitled to one, and feel I should be paid according to a fair and equitable standard.
This is because I am a fair and equitable person.
As pointed out in the grandparent, the real reason for these information control polices is exactly antithetical to that viewpoint. Claiming it results in a more harmonious workplace when people don't know about the bullshit is a no brainer. Nobody wants to put up with bullshit.
The problem is that the bullshit is so endemic, that its business as usual, and people are perfecty happy to cause the bullshit, as long as they are the beneficiary. That's basically your argument.
Mine is that the bullshit shouldn't be tolerated period, because it causes so many headaches.
That would be the [favoritism] poison, would it not?
Sally gets paid more than Alice, because?
Why wouldn't Alice be miffed about that?
Solution that doesn't open the door to nasty nepotism and favoritism?
Hard set pay grades, openly state where the figures come from, let people walk if they demand more pay.
Not everyone is a throat slitting MFer. As an employer who wants quality employees, employees that want to bleed me dry because they feel special, but really aren't, are not a commodity I want to keep anyway. (I am not actually an employer, but that's how I view the situation.)
Let's say for a moment that your boss is a letcherous toad.
As a typical slashdotter, I make the following presumptions:
You are male
Aged 25 to 35
Somewhat akward
Possibly a little heavy
Actually proficient at your IT job
Now, let's say some pretty 20something scrumpet with the IQ of a raddish, but with totally knockout boobs, great hair, perfect teeth, and good taste in perfume walks in the door fresh out of college, looking for a database programming job. You get assigned to test her proficiency. She bombs. Horribly. Doesn't even know what a tuple is.
She gets hired anyway.
You bite your lip, and do your job. She fucks shit up way more than she helps, is snarky, makes fun of your hair, is a total cunt, but lays on the coochie mama act around your boss, and he eats it like fudge.
Wouldn't you want to know how much more than you her parasitical leech ass makes?
Pick your poison:
Favoritism
Nepotisim
Sexism
Racisim
Religious persecution
Etc.
Employers don't want you to discuss with your co-workers what your pay and benefits packages are, because they offer sweet deals to people they like, and that favoritism is not always above board.
If other employees knew that billybob the janitor was getting paid three times what they were, they would demand to know why, ad worse, demand better pay. Usually billybob gets that sweet reimbursement for his labor because of some dirty secret, like he's the boss's lover, brother, illegitimate son, whatever. All of which are clearly outright illegal.
Keeping people ignorant let's you get away with abuses of power. That's why they penalise people who share their information.
Way to totally misinterperate what I said.
Simply because I am an engineer doesn't mean I don't value culture or heritage, or aesthetics in design. I bought an airbrush for personal use not that long ago, for doing artwork.
The point was about specialization, and the trend LA moves toward, which seems more geared toward hero worship of dead playwrights and literary trivia on the english lit side, and form over function, with excessive abstractionism in the graphic arts side. Art is an expression of the artist, and if you can't express yourself, you won't ever be a good one. Schools of art are useful only in teaching you how to better articulate yourself to produce that art.
However, when the architect focuses on "the aesthetic VISION!" Of his building design, completely neglecting the functional aspects, and ends up producing a leaky kontiki of an apartment building, I can't help but feel he is a bad architect. I've seen more than my fair share of "architectural wonders" that the only thing I wonder about is how they are still standing, and why the roof hasn't caved in from snow landing on top.
The best work is when function melds seamlessly with form, and the glorious looking building is equally beautifully engineered to service a need. Gargoyles on buildings serve a utilitarian purpose, and are not just idle decoration, for instance. They serve as downspouts and drains, just covered up creatively with grotesquely cute little statues of imps.
And that's just architecture.
What I am harping at here is that your "grand vision" doesn't mean shit if it has no meaning to your audience. If your audience has no more clue about your narrative structure than you do about the properties of an ether bond in a saccharide, don't expect them to understand what you are talking about.
Now. Imagine this little gem of a situation:
You want to write a story, but are told that you can only do so if already licensed to a publisher, and paying for a special room to write your story in, and that you have to obey an epic shitton of china-like regulations for narrative content, with oversight.
That's what people's obscene fears about science and engineering force hobby scientists and engineers to put up with. People are afraid of "the chemicals", or about "explosions", and "don't feel safe!" Because they don't know enough about the work those people are trying to do to know how totally benign and harmless it is. So, to make themselves feel safe, they institute all kinds of political red tape to make the bad scientists and scary engineers go away.
The LA world is not immune from this either. People worried about the use of the word "nigger" in mark twain's works for instance, or other such literary censorship, because it makes people "feel unsafe!".
The message I was conveying is that there is too much specialization, and not enough generalization. There is a decided lack of common ground for people to get to gether and realize that thir neighbor is just like they are, but with different interests.
People need to generalize, so that people can socialize effectively, communicate effectively, and work together effectively.
Without that, you end up with what we have now, with people so batshit scared of everyone else that we have people calling national security hotlines over every piddly assed thing, people convinced their neighbors are pedophiles out to rape their toddler, and people afraid to go next door and just talk!
Know what else the world doesn't need more of?
People who can spout shakespeare and who compose haiku on the spot about dandilions in the breeze, but get scared and apprehensive when somebody mentions dihydrogen monoxide being dumped into rivers and lakes.
What is needed is not more LA, or specialist training. What is needed is a braoder general education to help ensure that specializing adults can still effectively communicate with each other in society, and to keep irrational fears about "scary science!" And "scary engineering!" To a minimum.
Part of the problem there is the "everyone has a RIGHT to feel SAFE!" Mantra from the liberal arts heavy side of things.
(Bear with me here...)
In today's highly specialist society and economy, we constantly run into the situation where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and vise versa. The english major may not have the slightest idea what happens when you drop copper nuggets into concentrated nitric acid, for instance. Likewise, a chemistry major may not be terribly beholden to the works of shakespear enough to know which play the scene with the 3 witches is from.
The problem comes in, where well meaning but unsavvy people want to increase their perception of security. Knowledge is power, and power gives security. As people specialize, they sacrifice general knowledge for specialist knowledge. This means that as a consequence, the less general knowledge they have, the less emotionally and intellectually defended they are from general activities outside their speciality. This is why people have unreasonable fears about "chemicals", and "germs." They don't have the general knowledge to know that everything is a chemical, and that most germs are harmless, if not beneficial to them. Instead they get taken in by overpriced organic foods, and spend tons of money on hand sanitizer, and end up with kids suffering from allergies and asthma from being too clean.
A similr thing happens with people who would want to be cutting edge scientists and engineers.
They run into all manner of organized resistance from people outside those specialities if they attempt to hone their skills outside of a well entrenched and expensive to operate environment, because the idea of somebody inventing a new plastic in their basement is scary to people who don't know that polymer chemistry is pretty damned harmless, and that the cleaners under the sink are usually more toxic.
Engineers run afoul of people who get scared by shiny, unknown cylendrical objects with wires coming out. It doesn't even have to be that ominous looking; just cutting and fabricating metal parts and gears can make non-engineer types squeemish.
The chilling effect is that enginners, chemists, and general scientists have no choice but to operate in expensive/restricting university or corporate settings, and that greatly diminishes the desire of people who would otherwise make great contributions to those fields.
If you want people to be engineers and scientists, you have to *LET* those people be engineers and scientists. Placating to other people's irrational fears about "bombs", and "chemicals" does unspeakable harm to those vocations. For added fun, mention "radiation" as well. (Be sure to emphasise that you mean photonic emissions. Enjoy the hysterionics.)
To correct the problem, we need to enforce a suitable level of general scientific and engineering literacy in our country, so that people know that dihydrogen monixide is perfectly safe to drink, and to handle in large quantities.
This means sacrificing some of the time currently spent on specialist training vocations. Force that shakesperian actor to at least know what a group 7 element is, and about simple mechanical advantage before he gets his english degree. Force the MBA students to have a reasonable amount of general science and engineering in their academic diet of economic fluff pastry before they graduate.
Really, its the only way. General knowledge has to improve, so that people stop having irrational fears about "terrorists" and "mad scientists" as neighbors, or the situation will only get worse.
Would never work. Potato tubers can be cultivated vegitatively.
Buy a common idaho sput from the store. Let it start to sprout from its eyes. Slice the potato so that each slice has an eye on it. Plant the slices.
OMG! Cloned potatoes! (Sarcasm)
Because of this monsanto would never do it. Unless the potatoes also "featured" a state of being totally eyeless, and therefor totally useless as a perineal, they couldn't control supply and jack up the prices like they do with GE cereals and corn.